On the night of December 11, 1911, Owen Sound’s twin grain elevators burst into flame. Even though fire fighters battled the blaze, the holocaust made rapid progress. With the upper works of both wooden elevators about to collapse, the harbour lighthouse ablaze, and the roof of the nearly power house succumbing to sheets of fire, engineer George Sainsbury manned the pumps, showering the buring elevators with 40,000 gallons of water an hour.
That night, two CPR steamers – the Athabasca and Keewatin – were moored along the harbour wall. Neither ship steam. Cold, dead in the water, there was little likelihood they could be moved. Seeing their plight, firemen and spectators alike raced through a rain of sparks, grabbed lines thrown to them by CPR crew members and, like a gigantic tug-of-war team, pulled the steamers to safety.
The heat of the burning elevators was so intense that the streams of water poured on them turned to steam. The first to go was Elevator A, old, dry and nearly empty. The smell of burning grain from Elevator B was sickening. Nearly full of wheat and oats, her end was prolonged. Suddenly, under the pressure of fire, water, and grain, it collapsed. Firemen working below watched in frozen horror as thousands of burning bushels of grain formed a fiery waterfall directly over their heads. They barely had time to dash to safety.
As the sun rose on December 12th, dawn revealed the extent of the tragedy. It had been a million dollar fire. A mountain of blackened wood and grain remained where the elevators once stood. With no capacity to store grain, the harbour was done. The CPR fleet moved to a new terminal at Port McNichol. Once busy shipping lanes silted over as fewer vessels arrived each year. It wasn’t until 1925 that a new million-bushel grain elevator was built on Owen Sound’s west side. A new era in the city’s history had begun.
Originally aired May 22nd, 2016
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