FOXLEY RIVER – A Guardian-Patriot reporter in 1960 observed 73-year-old Jane Brown standing in a ditch, crying. Her house and barns had just been consumed in one of the worst forest fires to strike Prince Edward Island.
Over a three-week period, starting the week of Aug. 21, close to 18,000 acres of forest and farmland was destroyed in the North Enmore to Black Banks area of West Prince.
George Wooton’s story tells of Mrs. Brown walking through the ditch and finding bottles of her preserves which had been placed there for safe-keeping by volunteers who tried in vain to save her property.
“God bless the hands that saved even these,” Mrs. Brown remarked.
The Jane Brown story is one of the many newspaper clippings about the fire of 1960 that Vivian Phillips preserved in a Princess Margaret scrapbook for a half-century.
The pages had been pored over so many times, though, that they were becoming ragged.
Last winter, after the scrapbook had been borrowed for a school project and then returned to its owner. Vivian’s daughter, Thelma Phillips decided it was time to open up the scrapbook to a wider audience.
“I knew the 50th anniversary was coming up so it prompted me to try to share it with more people,” she said. “People are hungry for that information.”
Numerous houses, barns and outbuildings were lost in the stubborn fire, which was fueled by ever-changing winds. Sometimes families breathed a sigh of relief when the wind suddenly turned, sparing their homes. Then the wind would turn again. One family moved five times in four days before the flaming fingers of the forest fire grabbed their Foxley River home.
Communities of North Enmore, Conway, Inverness, Victoria West, Northam, MacNeills Mills, Freeland, Ellerslie and the Black Banks were threatened by the fire that jumped the Western Road and sent sparks across the Foxley River.
With barely an inch of rain for the entire month of August, conditions were ripe for forest fires, and losses were recorded all over the Maritimes.
Vivian Phillips and her husband Harold were running a store in Freeland in 1960. They lost a shed and trees on their Foxley River property, but were lucky compared to many of their neighbours.
While Harold was using his truck to help evacuate families from homes threatened by the fire, Vivian ran the family store. Thelma was not yet born. Events, she has since discovered though, are often referenced as being “before” or “after” the fire.
The clippings tell of the fire fighting efforts, of men with blistered feet from fighting fires on scorching hot ground, of straps from backpacks tearing into their weary shoulders, of the army being called in to assist with the effort and of women and girls preparing meals day and night at the Ellerslie Legion command centre. The RCMP maintained a constant presence, relaying messages via radio car and dealing with traffic congestion largely caused by the curious.
At its peak, about 1,000 people were involved in the fire fighting effort.
The clippings can now be viewed online at www.thelmaphillips.ca. Click on “1960 West Prince Fire.”
