Lights! Camera! Fire?! The Great Toronto Fire of 1904 and the Start of Canada's Motion Picture Industry

  On the night of April 19, 1904 the temperature in Toronto, Ontario Canada plummeted to 25 degrees Fahrenheit and snow flurries started to fall throughout the city with wind gusts in excess of thirty miles per hour.

At just after 8 o’clock that night a city police constable, making his nightly rounds downtown on foot, noticed smoke seeping from the windows of a tie factory located at 58 Wellington Street West, what then was considered the industrial and commercial heart of the city.

A fire had begun in the elevator shaft of the E & S Currie Limited men’s neckwear factory.  This was the start of the Great Fire of Toronto of 1904.

It would take nine full hours for the fire to burn itself out.  Before all was said and done over 100 buildings would be completely destroyed by fire that night.  Flames could be seen leaping into the sky for miles around and fire companies from Buffalo, New York and the nearby city of Hamilton all responded in a vain attempt to keep the blaze under control.  

Panoramic View of the Fire of 1904

Then Toronto Mayor Thomas Urquhart called in as many firefighters via telegram from surrounding towns and cities as he could, and had them rushed to downtown Toronto via express train to help battle the flames. Two-hundred and fifty firefighters, a remarkable number for a time when fire departments were woefully small and still relied on horse drawn pumps or buckets to douse flames with water responded to his call.

Toronto Mayor Thomas Urquhart

Driven by gusting winds and closely packed factories the Great Toronto Fire of 1904 swept rapidly through the city’s downtown.  By 4 a.m. that night twenty acres of Toronto had been completely incinerated.  Though the city declared the fire itself under control by sunrise on April 20, 1904, fires would continue to pop up downtown for the next three days, and the ruins would continue to smolder for as long as six more weeks.

On the night of the fire, gusting winds caused the flames to leap from rooftop to rooftop, and the Toronto Fire Department was ill prepared to deal with such a large and rapidly moving conflagration.  

The fire moved across the city in a southeasterly direction.  Guests at the Queen’s Hotel (now called the Fairmount Royal York) Toronto’s grandest hotel, were pressed into service to save the city’s then most elegant building by forming a bucket brigade to halt the flames and cover the roof with wet blankets to keep it from catching fire as a result of windblown embers and debris.

View of Toronto Fire from Rooftop (from a still of Scott's Film)

One week prior to the fire, on April 12, 1904, Toronto’s fire chief John Thompson, who suffered a broken leg after falling off a ladder during the Great Fire, had asked the city’s Board of Control for a $35,000 yearly budget increase for the fire department, starting that the city’s fire department was, “woefully unprepared to deal with a major conflagration.”

Thompson’s efforts to increase funding for Toronto’s Fire Department were supported by Mayor Urquhart, who believed that the possibility was a clear and ever present danger to his city, but the Board of Control felt that an increase in the size of the city’s Fire Department would be a needless and frivolous expense despite the fact that as a frontier city in 1849 Toronto had nearly completely burnt to the ground as a result of a localized warehouse fire that had gotten quickly out of control.

Days before the Great Toronto Fire of 1904 the Toronto Sun reported that when asked how he felt about the Board of Control’s unwillingness to increase funding for the city’s fire department Mayor Urquhart said, “Oh well, I guess we’ll have to risk it one more year.”

Not only gusting winds, but also new and modern building design at the start of the 20th century, helped the Great Toronto Fire of 1904 spread so rapidly out of control.

Damaged Still from 1904 Motion Picture

Modern buildings of the time, not built with any preexisting fire code for safety in place, tended to have stairwells and elevator shafts located in the center of tall buildings and these open areas created internal chimney effects which increased the heat and intensity at which small fires burned and spread.

And though, by 1904 elevators which had been invented by American Elisha Ottis in  1857 were commonplace, sprinkler systems were an as yet expensive and almost nonexistent novelty.  Of the over 100 buildings that were completely destroyed by the Great Toronto Fire of 1904 only three are known to have had any type of sprinkler system installed.

To this day, the true cause of the Great Toronto Fire of 1904 remains unknown, although the most commonly accepted theories are that either a stove had been left on by a worker who had departed earlier in the day, or that an electrical short somewhere in the E & S Currie Limited tie factory had produced sparks that precipitated a fire in the building’s main elevator shaft.

Miraculously, though dozens of firefighters suffered injuries mostly ranging from smoke inhalation to broken bones fighting the Great Toronto Fire of 1904, no one died as a direct result of the blaze.  

As a result of the Great Toronto Fire of 1904 fire code laws across Canada would be changed and all commercial buildings built anywhere in the Canadian province of Ontario from 1905 onwards would be required by law to have emergency sprinkler systems installed.  To put this in perspective, the state of California in the United States would not require commercial buildings to have emergency sprinkler systems installed until 1974 and to this day, on a state by state basis, the fight over mandatory sprinkler systems in public buildings is still ongoing in the U.S.

Not only did the Great Toronto Fire of 1904 give rise to the widespread use of emergency sprinkler systems, but it also helped to create a major motion picture industry in Canada.

During the fire a local photographer and film producer named George Scott, along with a crew of assistants grabbed a motion picture camera in the midst of the conflagration and began filming downton.

Scott released the film himself in the United States and entitled it The Great Toronto Fire of 1904.  Scott’s primitive documentary captured horse drawn wagons rushing to the scene of the fire, city buildings silhouetted by flames against the night sky and firefighters shooting geysers of water skyward.

His film was a major commercial success in both the United States and Great Britain.  It was perhaps the first ever motion picture to portray firefighters as brave and heroic and was the first exposure that many people from around the world had ever gotten to modern major firefighting techniques.  In 1904 most small towns in the United States, Canada and Great Britain still relied on water filled buckets as their primary means of extinguishing fires so it was a remarkable experience for many moviegoers to see on film such innovative modern inventions as steam powered fire engines and curbside fire hydrants.  

According to Canadian film historian Peter Morris in his book, Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema from 1895-1939, Scott’s work did more than any other Canadian filmmaker’s to, “avoid the almost mindless simplicity of the image of Canada that was being projected by filmmakers from abroad at the time”.  (1992 McGill-Queen’s University Press P. 38)

Firefighters from Scott's Film

The Great Toronto Fire of 1904 destroyed a total of 114 buildings in the city’s downtown sector and left an estimated 5,000 people, or almost a third of the city’s workforce in 1904, unemployed overnight.  But many of these jobs were replaced almost instantly in the aftermath of the Great Fire as construction across Toronto boomed.

Tragically one man named John Croft, an explosive’s expert who was called in by the city to help safely clear rubble and debris, would die during the cleanup effort when a stick of dynamite he was working with prematurely exploded.

As a direct result of the Great Fire of Toronto on April 19, 1904 more stringent fire safety codes would be adopted all across Canada and within a decade Canada would form a motion picture industry that soon would grow in both size and reputation to rival that of both the United States and Great Britain.