Written By Alice Gibb
When Mrs. S.J. Scoyns of Komoka spotted a glow through her front window at 5 a.m. on a winter’s morning in 1947, she could guess the cause. The Komoka Planing Mill, directly across the street, was literally going up in flames. Her daughter quickly phoned in the alarm to the operator in Byron, the nearest community. At about the same time, farmer William Tunks, who lived about a mile away, also spotted an ominous glow as he headed to his barn. He also began spreading the alarm by phone.
Racing to the scene, Tunks entered the mill’s blazing front office and carried out furniture and some office equipment. One item that he managed to rescue was a china teapot.
The Komoka Planing Mill has been purchased a year earlier by owner C.F.
McCutcheon of London. The buildings were reduced to smoldering ruins in less than one hour after the fire was spotted. One major reason was that there wasn’t a local volunteer fire brigade close at hand to respond to the emergency.
The sprawling mill, which employed two former servicemen, included the main frame building, an office and a smaller storage shed. Neighbors managed to save an adjoining two-storey frame lumber storage building by splashing it with melting snow.
Unfortunately, most of the mill’s costly machinery plus a large quantity of lumber were destroyed in the fire. The owner’s loss was estimated at about $20,000 – and that was only partially covered by insurance.
“Two carloads of lumber were to have been shipped today,” Mr. McCutcheon told a Free Press reporter. “That’s all gone and I doubt that the machinery is anything more than scrap now.”
While the exact cause of the fire wasn’t immediately known, arson wasn’t suspected. McCutcheon guessed that the blaze might have started when a spark from the boiler ignited a wall of the frame building.
The mill’s owner had planned to hire more men at the mill in the immediate future. In a period when veterans were having difficulty finding work, the job losses were mourned as much as the ruined mill.
The most expensive piece of machinery lost in the fire was the “sticker”, used to cut grooves in wooden flooring. McCutcheon, who had spent $10,000 on equipping his business, discovered that the sticker was a total loss.
Although the mill was engulfed by 5:45 a.m., a huge pile of sawdust continued to burn into the early afternoon.
Even if a watchman had been on site, McCutcheon said sadly, it is unlikely he could have saved the mill because “we have no fire protection.” The protection that we take for granted in 2010 was still a luxury in the postwar period.
