When fire broke out at a hay barn at York Point Slip at 2:30 PM on June 02, 1877, the residents of Saint John were under the impression that no conflagration could match the fire department’s state of the art Amoskeag steam powered, horse drawn fire engines.
Unfortunately, recent cost cutting measures had forced the newly formed professional fire department to share its horses with the public works department. When eminent disaster struck, the horses were all at work on roads projects some distance away and so had to be brought back to the firehall before they could attend to the city’s most pressing need ever. By the time they arrived on site, the Great Fire of 1877 was well under way. By disaster’s end, two fifths of Saint John was lost.
Loyalist House, built in 1810 by David Merritt – a cousin of my direct Merritt ancestors, is one of the few buildings to have survived and now stands as a museum to the Loyalist era at the corners of Union and Germain.
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