Peoples Stores fire in Midland March 4, 1960
Toronto. Photography introduced the average person to events of the day and to history. Over 60 years ago, I was seconded to our office in Midland, Ontario to lend a hand. Imagine my surprise on that chilly Monday morning, March 7th, 1960 when I walked down King St to reach the central office on Hugel.
The store called “‘Peoples Stores” had been gutted by fire! The previous Friday, March 4th, fire broke out and before the fire brigade could bring it under control, the top two floors plus the street level store interior were consumed! I captured the loss on film with my Exakta VXIIa on that Monday afternoon. The image at left is just one of the many photographs I took.
The “fire sale” was recored photographically as it was fought by local fire brigades. Photos by the local paper, the “Midland Free Press Herald” plus some captions are now part of the Huronia Museum website. The Free Press Herald began its decline in the 1960s and finally expired the summer of 2013 after bouncing from pillar to post, losing critical assets to each of its many buyers. Like other newspapers and magazines, it was a victim of the onslaught of much lower cost digital media and superficial coverage of events.
If not for photography, we would never know just how devastating this catastrophe was to the small community once the home to Leitz Canada who made the lenses of Walther Mandler and briefly the later M4 Leica cameras (M4, KE-7A, M4-2, etc) as Leitz struggled with financial issues. The factory still exists, but is now American owned, most recently by Raytheon.
