Blaze sparked typhoid epidemic, ‘mission’ to North End

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This article was published 10/06/2023 (1091 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In October 1904, a fire blazed in downtown Winnipeg — the worst in the young city’s history. Flames shot through the empty elevator shaft of the new Bulman building, quickly engulfing all six floors and spreading to the Ashdown hardware building across the street where it was fed by lumber, oils and paints.

Great conflagration causes loss of about half a million, proclaimed the Tribune. “There remains nothing this morning but a mass of confused brick, stone, and cement in the basement,” wrote the Free Press. Neither of the newspapers, however, dwelled upon what would inadvertently become the deadliest impact of the blaze: in order to put the fire out, water had to be drawn into the city mains from the badly polluted Assiniboine River.

Two weeks later, the city was ravaged with typhoid. Desperate for answers, the city brought in an American expert, Edwin Oakes Jordan, who quickly identified the fire as the origin of the latest epidemic. The river was contaminated, he said, and “even the occasional use of the raw Assiniboine water is an unwholesome and dangerous practice.” Just as quickly, however, he pointed out that this was not the city’s only source of infectious disease. His damning report noted filthy alleys soiled with human waste, and countless homes relying on water pumps that pulled from contaminated ground water. Most disturbing was the prevalence of box closets, a kind of above-ground outhouse that had a tendency to leak.

Amidst the chaos, one woman was doing her best to battle disease in Winnipeg’s poorest neighbourhoods. A widowed stenographer, Margaret Scott’s life took a turn when she met C.C. Owen, an Anglican reverend who had been working among the poor of the city. Soon, Scott had quit her job and taken up permanent residence at the Winnipeg Lodging and Coffee House, where she drew no salary and subsisted only on small donations. From this home base she made visits to the homes of young immigrant mothers in particular, instructing them on how to care for minor ailments, lice and cuts. At night, she stayed up reading medical textbooks.

Scott’s work did not go unnoticed, and in 1904 a group of women assembled to create the Margaret Scott Nursing Mission. By 1905, the mission had a permanent home at 99 George St., two nurses to accompany Scott on her rounds, and an operating grant from the city. It also had a healthy list of supporters from among Winnipeg’s wealthiest and most notable.

Though the support these people gave undoubtedly saved lives, the mission’s donors drew a sharp distinction between themselves and those whom they served. To most of the mission’s board members, the city’s North End was a foreign country and Scott was a brave missionary venturing across its border.

Scott and her supporters were purveyors of the Social Gospel, a protestant movement that called upon Christians to address social ills through direct action, and their aid often took on a moralizing aspect. Immigrants who came to the mission for help could also expect to be taught the “Canadian” way of doing things. There was an undercurrent of blame to the education provided by institutions like the mission, an implication that if a young mother had done things the right way, perhaps her child would not be so ill. Even the city’s public-health officer seemed to hold immigrant neighbourhoods responsible for the typhoid epidemic: “These people are not familiar with any sanitary code,” he wrote.

Nevertheless, Scott seems to have been a popular figure among people of all backgrounds. She was a kind of folk hero, often walking or biking miles every day with her little black medicine bag. To neighbourhood children, Scott became “the lady with the pony,” and they would hop on her cart laden with food and linens to take rides as she travelled between houses. Scott refused to let the mission solicit donations, convinced that, “A worthy object, worthily and unselfishly carried out, makes its own appeal.”

And for a time, this proved to be true. The presence of this understated woman and her growing team of nurses walking through the streets of the city did indeed make its own appeal, and the Margaret Scott Nursing Mission continued its work through the Spanish flu pandemic of 1919 and on through the following decade.

Unfortunately, the mission’s reliance on Scott as a defining figure and its refusal to solicit donations would be its downfall. After Scott’s death in 1931, the mission foundered. Although it limped along for another decade, a 1940 report criticized its lack of structure and over-reliance on student nurses. By 1943, the mission had closed its doors permanently, transferring its remaining funds to a scholarship in the name of Margaret Scott.