Ottawa Canada Central - General Fire of September 1874  Along the Canada Central between Ottawa and Renfrew, the fires are again raging, and it seems as if the whole country along that line of railway is to be denuded of its timber. Hundreds of thousands of cords of wood that would have supplied the railway for years to come, has been destroyed. Coming down on the train at night the whole countryside appears to be dotted over with fires. In many places the farmers are turning the fires to good account, as the burn has been so clean that hundreds of acres of swamps and bush land were easily prepared for wheat. The Governor General had an excellent opportunity on Monday night of seeing a ten acre fallow on fire. There had evidently been a logging bee on a farm east of Stittsville, and the piles were fired in the evening so that when the train came along, there were nearly one hundred bon fires blazing in the fallow a short distance from the track. Farmers say that their fence timber that they have been saving for years past is nearly all burned, and Central Canada will never be as well fenced again with cedars as it has been. |