Many readers of this column may remember Joe Potvin, who was a longtime resident and early settler in this community. In 1899, Mr. Potvin was living on High Street. His home was right next door to the McCloskey’s Bottling Works, which was then located on the corner of Vachereau and High streets.
At a few minutes before midnight, July 29, 1899, the continuous ringing of the St. Alphonsus Church bell woke Joe from a sound sleep. Fire! There was, as yet, no organized fire department, and such fire protection as the town had in the early 1890s was provided by the lumber companies that organized the fire-fighting units among their employees.
Joe was one of those employees working for the Export Lumber Company, which owned the Big Mill located near today’s Municipal Park. Tupper also had no water system at that time, and the only source of water pressure was a single pipe laid on top of tile ground from the Big Mill. Joe had been assigned, in the case of fire, to go directly to the mill and start the pump that forced water through the line.
There were no streetlights and, with only a smoky lantern to light his way through complete darkness, Joe found his way down Mill Street to the planning mill where he and fellow employee Joe Martin started the pump. Screams of “No water! No water!” resonated down the street from the corner of Cliff and Lake streets, where the King and Page General Store had become an uncontrolled inferno that rapidly engulfed surrounding buildings. A distraught Joe Potvin soon found that drainage valves had unknowingly been left open, but before that discovery was corrected, the town was doomed.
A.J. Clarke, former postmaster here and well-known newspaper correspondent, recounted his personal memories of that fire in an article dated July 30, 1935, which appeared in the Tupper Lake Free Press. Parts of the following description were excerpted from Mr. Clarke’s account. With the failure of the water supply, volunteers formed a bucket brigade to Racquette Pond in a vain attempt to stem the fire that had quickly spread to the large Hotel Windsor (today’s Old Northern Pub). As the flames spread, air currents set up by the heat of such a large fire carried embers across the street, igniting a building owned by Harry Cohn (next to today’s Tip Top Electric). This building housed the post office, where only two weeks before Clarence King had been appointed our third postmaster.
The fire then raced beyond all hope of control up Park Street, destroying everything in its path as far as Sears Hill. This included the Commercial Hotel (later rebuilt as the Iroquois Hotel, now the Stewart’s Store location). The fire consumed the John Sears boarding house and the home of Medie Sears and Patrick Edwards, finally stopping at the Cheney Avenue corner.
Moving down Park Street, the flames turned everything there into a raging inferno, destroying in its path the Thissell building near the present Tupper Lake National Bank location. The Thissell building, owned by beloved physician Dr. Thissell, housed the L.C. Maid drug store, the John Goff jewelry store and, on the upper floor, the offices of the Santa Clara Lumber Company as well as the offices of Attorney J.L. Tallman, justice of the peace. It then raced up Wawbeek Avenue, totaling everything, including the Hayes Livery, where the Knight of Columbus Hall stands today.
In an ironic twist, Mr. Hayes was using the horses and wagons from his livery to bring buckets of water from the pond to wet down blankets that were being placed on the roof of the Hotel Altamont (corner of Park and Wawbeek), a method that, together with a providential shift in the wind, saved that building, even as fire destroyed Mr. Hayes’ livery. Meanwhile, across the street from the hotel, dynamite was being detonated in a vain attempt to stop the flames spreading by blowing up three buildings.
It didn’t succeed in stopping the fire beast that then torched and destroyed the small Bernier Hotel on High Street (located near today’s Stewart’s Store dumpster). The fire then jumped Vachereau Street (then just a lane leading to Cheney Avenue) and engulfed the McCloskey Bottling Works (today’s Frenette building). Next to go was Joe Potvin’s house along with a bakery owned by Archie LeBoeuf, a machine shop, three residential homes and finally the Grace Episcopal Church before the fire stopped just short of reaching the P.H. McCarthy home, where Ed LeBlanc lives today.
What a chaotic, frightening bedlam our Main Street must have been on that ill-fated night. Imagine wagon teams of exhausted horses bolting trip after trip in the darkened night. Imagine an army of frantic residents, many of them women, wetting down blankets and forming a relay to successively smother the roof fire on the two-story Hotel Altamont.
Imagine the scene across the street from the hotel, where dynamite charges were exploding in an attempt to blow up three buildings, and imagine the entire business block as a mass of roaring flames. Imagine watching in horrified disbelief as building after building is consumed by fire so intense and hot that it deformed and melted iron. As resident John Timmons was later to exclaim, if Hell were any hotter, then he was certainly going to try to keep away from it.