Walk Brings Old and New Dunbar Fires Together

Historian John Atkin (orange shirt) tells May 29 Salmonberry Days tour about the 1919 Point Grey fire that left scorch marks on giant stumps in Pacific Spirit Park. 

By Carol Volkart

With last summer’s 41st and Collingwood fire still fresh in their minds, a group of Dunbar residents got a look Thursday at the scars left by a far larger blaze in our area more than 100 years ago.

A Salmonberry Days tour, led by historian John Atkin and Dunbar Residents’ Association board member Angus McIntyre, wound gently through the Camosun bog, up the stairs and down a trail to the tour’s piece de resistance – a giant stump still bearing the scorch marks from a massive fire that tore through more than 500 acres of our area in mid-July of 1919.

Atkin and McIntyre cited newspaper accounts of the time to describe how the fire, thought to have been brought under control after three days of intense firefighting, broke out again overnight after a strong wind blew up, spreading embers into new areas.

Known as the Point Grey fire (Dunbar was then part of the Point Grey municipality), the first outbreak raged between 29th Avenue on the south and 19th Avenue on the north and from Imperial Street on the west to Highbury Street on the east. The second blaze, between 21st and 23rd Avenues and Bruce and Crown streets, sent residents hauling furniture out of threatened houses in the middle of the night, according to a July 17, 1919 story in the Vancouver Daily Sun.

Atkin, a civic historian, author and walking-tour guide, used his expertise to paint a picture of a very different Dunbar at the time of those long-ago blazes. It was sparsely populated, a place of giant 300-350-foot trees that were hand logged and sent all over the world. “Vancouver Builds the World” was a 1912 headline, he recalled. There was also plentiful slash from all the logging activity, which helped the fire get out of control quickly and rage wildly for three days.

But tour participants who experienced the 2024 blaze may well have felt some déjà vu as they learned more about what happened in 1919. There were the same flying embers, the near-misses, the citizens leaping in to help, the fears about what could have happened if circumstances had been slightly different, and even the vagueness about the fire’s cause.

Back then, it was Provincial Forest Ranger R.E. Mills saying that residents couldn’t realize how dangerous their position had been, and how fortunate they were the worst hadn’t happened. All of Point Grey was in danger at one point, he said in a July 16, 1919 newspaper story. “Had the fire not been caught in time it is impossible to say where it might have gone.” It was only the winds blowing in the right direction, he said, that prevented the fire spreading toward the university and burning everything down to the water.

Another near miss was the Sacred Heart Convent, now St. George’s Junior School, which was only saved “by the efforts of a large number of provincial fire rangers,” the story said.

Familiar, too, was the vagueness about the origins of the fire. A throwaway sentence in the July 16 newspaper story is the only clue: “It is believed by Mr. Mills that berry pickers, through carelessness, started the fire.”

And just as citizens jumped in to help in 2024, hauling out hoses and buckets to extinguish embers and water down trees and houses, the citizens of 1919 did their part.

“Point Grey residents from all sections of the municipality turned out in force to supplement the efforts of the provincial fire rangers who made such a valiant stand against the fire during last Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday,” the Vancouver Daily Sun’s July 17 story said.

There were also the brave souls who jumped in to save the contents of threatened houses, the “many willing hands who braved showers of sparks and the heat and smoke of the approaching flames to save the goods and chattels, of the residents.”

No casualties were reported in either the 1919 or 2024 fires. But more than 100 years makes a big difference in one important area — the cost. In 1919, the July 16 story said, the “damage to property will amount to several hundred dollars.”