A walking tour in Aylmer will retrace the path of the town's most destructive fire

Tashi Farmilo

A guided walking tour through Aylmer will revisit the exact ground once scorched by the Great Aylmer Fire of 1921, giving residents a chance to walk the same streets that were consumed by flames more than a century ago. The free tour takes place August 10, from 6:30 pm to 8 pm, led by historian Lynne Rodier, starting at the Old Aylmer Cultural Centre at 120 Main Street and ending at Memorial Park, on the corner of Main and Park Streets. The date is not a coincidence: it falls exactly 105 years after the fire tore through the heart of Aylmer.

The story the tour tells is a dramatic one. According to the Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network, it was a hot, dry afternoon in August 1921 when someone emptied hot stove ashes into a patch of parched grass near Holt's livery stables, just east of Bancroft on Main Street. Though the cause of the fire has never been pinned down with certainty, which only adds to its lasting hold on local memory. One theory traces it to a stray spark from a nearby garage that drifted into a horse stable. Another, passed down informally within Aylmer families over the decades, points instead to a laundry operation where clothes were boiled over an open fire. No official record ever settled the question, and the mystery has become as much a part of the town's folklore as the fire itself.

What should have been an unremarkable moment became a catastrophe within minutes. The historic account describes how a rising wind caught the flames and drove them northeast, straight through the commercial and residential core of the town, carving a path of destruction two blocks wide and nearly a mile long before it was finally beaten back.

By the time the fire burned itself out, 120 homes had been reduced to ashes, 125 families had lost their properties, and roughly 700 people found themselves without a place to live in a town of only a few thousand residents. Remarkably, given the scale of the devastation, the fire claimed only one life. Dominique George Lortie died after rushing into a burning stable to save his horse, while his wife and children waited nearby at a restaurant where the family had been that day. His descendants still live in the region, and their family's account of that afternoon has become part of the oral history passed down through generations of Aylmer families.

The town's response in the moment showed both desperation and resourcefulness. Aylmer's own volunteer fire brigade was quickly overwhelmed and called in reinforcements from Hull and Ottawa, but even the combined crews could do little more than fight along the fire's flanks, trying to pinch the blaze into as narrow a corridor as possible rather than stop it outright. It was, in the end, the town's own green spaces that did much of the work firefighters could not. The Network's account notes that the open lawns of the town park and the wooded grounds of the old Symmes property on the park's north side acted as natural firebreaks, keeping the flames from crossing east of Broad Street, and similar patches of trees and cemetery grounds elsewhere in town are credited with sparing buildings like St. Paul's Catholic Church from the same fate that befell so many wooden homes and shops nearby.

What followed the disaster said as much about Aylmer as the fire did. Residents began rebuilding the day after the flames died down, unwilling to let the approach of winter catch them without shelter. The Presbyterian Church, among the buildings lost, rose again brick by brick, with families across town each contributing individual bricks to fund its reconstruction. That spirit of quick, collective recovery is part of what the tour aims to capture, alongside the physical scars and quiet reminders still visible in Aylmer's streetscape today, more than a century after the town's worst single day.

Leading the walk is Lynne Rodier, a historian with deep personal ties to the neighbourhood she studies. Rodier has family roots in Old Aylmer going back two generations, and her research into the sector's past, and that of the wider Outaouais region, has made her a fixture of local heritage programming. She is a member of the Aylmer Heritage Association and has said her interest in the town's history grew directly out of that family connection, describing it as something that started with simple curiosity about where she came from.

For those planning to attend, the tour is free and organized as part of Aylmer's summer heritage programming, with more information available by calling 3-1-1 or emailing patrimoine@gatineau.ca.