The Halifax Explosion of December 6, 1917 was one of the largest man-made explosions in history and its deadly impact still ripples through Nova Scotian family histories today. Much of this is from the collective trauma that resulted from an explosion that levelled swaths of the city, killing almost 2,000 people and injuring an estimated 9,000. Some continues from colonial erasure, which has just started to be addressed.
Imagine if you knew your family had died in a horrifying disaster and yet no one took notice or believed what you said. At the time of the 100th Anniversary commemoration of the disaster in 2017, the research of Mi’kmaw playwright and filmmaker Catherine Martin was instrumental in sharing the memory of the lost communities of Kepe’kek and Maskwiekati Malpek in the media and correcting the public record about how many lives had been lost at the places called in English Turtle Grove or Tuft’s Cove. Each year on the Dartmouth shore of Halifax Harbour, Catherine Martin calls out the names of the Mi’kmaq who died, among them her family members, a remembrance of the people who lived there. The Globe and Mail article is just a glimpse: “My great aunt Rachel Cope, my great grandma Sarah, and her little baby Annie, who was two. Leo, little Frankie, who was three – oh my God, I just imagine him. Little Henry … .”
Their community on the harbour was completely destroyed, but with great resilience the Mi’kmaq of the area continued, the few survivors holding the memory of what they knew happened. In a report digitized by the Nova Scotia Archives, relief official J.H. Mitchell described his visit to the community immediately following the disaster. The dismissive language (rejecting the number of casualties reported as exaggeration, for example, and saying that the informant Mr. Moore had been drinking) seems chillingly at odds with the horror of the scene he describes in his notes, where the survivors were still finding parts of people who had been blown up: “Very near the explosion. The houses used to be shaded by pines, now everything is gone. Of some houses, there is absolutely no vestige, not even of ashes. Others are buried under the shattered trees… The devastation is incomprehensible.”
For the government, this devastation conveniently concluded the land expropriation that was already in motion at the time of the explosion. Very recently, the Millbrook First Nation, where many of the surviving families relocated, settled a land claim and are working on redeveloping the area. The lands returned to them are contaminated and will require extensive environmental remediation by the previous occupants.
On the other side of the harbour, at 29 Kaye Street in Halifax’s North End, my grandmother’s aunt and uncle, Frederick and Rose Killam, lived with their four children in a very different world. They had a comfortable house next to the Methodist Church. Fred, who had grown up in the fertile Annapolis Valley, was a florist who managed Nova Scotia Nursery – a greenhouse and florist business at nearby 254-256 Lockman (now Barrington), right next to the Admiralty Grounds and Wellington Barracks.
Aunt Rose, (born Rosina Maude Theakston) was the granddaughter of prominent Halifax printer and missionary Major Paylor Theakston. She was mother to a young family and active in the church community. Fred was a few years older than my great-grandfather Dr. Harold Edwin Killam, and he and Rose had housed Harold so that he could complete medical school at Dalhousie University. The brothers were close and their children were loving cousins as they grew. The distance between their respective homes, in Halifax and in the Annapolis Valley, was shortened by the train nicknamed the “Blueberry Express.” Fred Killam was frequently called back to the valley to decorate for hometown weddings.
Most of I what know about what happened to our family on December 6, 1917, comes from the unusually brief story Nana told about the explosion, which I think was a result of the trauma and “the less said about it, the better.” This is augmented by a neighbour’s first-person account held in the Nova Scotia Archives and in an article that Nana’s sister Kathleen Cogswell wrote in the Nova Scotia Medical Journal about their father’s practice. [1]
On December 6, 1917, Fred Killam was not at work at the Nursery. Instead he was sick in bed with diphtheria. Rose, who was expecting a baby, was at home looking after him. It was a Monday morning, and Aunt Rose was starting another housekeeping week in the cellar. It was wash day. Because of Fred’s illness, the children had been sent to stay with her family at 56 Seymour Street, on the other side of town in South End Halifax. The whole family would have been grieving, as Rose Theakston’s father Henry had just died on December 3, 1917, of heart disease. Rose was not aware that in the harbour down the hill, two ships had collided and a fire aboard one of the boats was catching the attention of those on shore.
What happened next, at 9:05 a.m. when the munitions ship Mont Blanc detonated, was described in the long letter Ethel Jane Bond wrote to her Uncle Murray Kellough in Winnipeg, 10 days after the disaster. Ethel Bond’s family lived at 35 Kaye Street next to the Killams. Her father Alexander Bond was killed immediately by the blast, and both sisters, Bertha and Ethel, were injured. Even so, they went to the aid of their neighbours immediately following the explosion.
Finding their father killed near the house, under debris, the sisters attempted to uncover his body, but “the cries of the living who needed help were so insistent that we simply had to leave and help them. Fires started as soon as the explosion came and we were forced to act quickly. Our house did not catch immediately. Killams were calling. Mr. K. was in bed and the kiddies were out here at Seymour Street with the Theakstons. Mrs. Killam was in the cellar at the time and thought she had done something amiss with the furnace and it had blown up. She had a very hard job getting out and strained herself badly. Mr. K. was blown out of bed and could not do much to help himself. The whole back of their house was slid around and the upper floor was blown down on a slant, so Bid and I guided him as he slid down in his night clothes. We got him onto a mattress that Mrs. K. threw down and covered him with blankets while Mrs. K. got some clothes for him. We left them and went over the field to the parsonage, not expecting to see one of them alive.”
In the immediate aftermath, Ethel and Bid (Bertha) found that the minister Mr. Swetnam and his young daughter Dorothy had survived, while Mrs. Swetnam and their child, Carmen, were killed. They helped Mr. Swetnam rescue Dorothy from the ruins, as the parsonage caught fire. Eventually, after salvaging what they could from their burning home, Bertha Bond was sent in a car to the Theakstons with the Killams, while Ethel evacuated to the woods, along with Rose Theakston’s visiting sister and brother-in-law (he was a minister in PEI – it is not clear where they were staying). The Bond sisters were reunited at a friends’ home on South Street, where they stayed.
Meanwhile, in the Annapolis Valley, Dr. Harold Killam was doing double duty, serving in the Canadian Army as a Medical Corps Captain at Aldershot Camp and continuing his practice as a country doctor in his off hours. When news of the explosion reached the Valley, Dr. Killam was put on the first relief train into the city along with other medical personnel. He was sure his family members had been killed, and when the train was halted at Rockingham due to the destruction, his fears increased.
In her article, Kathleen Cogswell wrote, “soldiers there were turning away all those without urgent business in the city and providing what transportation they could to doctors, nurses, and much-needed supplies. My father was assigned a seat in a truck. “I know this is a foolish question,” he said to the driver, “but do you happen to know a Fred Killam, of Nova Scotia Nurseries?” To his surprise and relief, the driver did and also knew that he and his family had survived while every other family on that street had had fatalities and whole families had been wiped out. The doctor could get on with his nightmare job of giving emergency aid in the then new Camp Hill Hospital without the fear that the next victim he saw might be a member of his own family. (A sister and her family also lived in the city but not so close to the explosion site and, he thought, would have been in less danger. They also escaped, some with bad cuts.”
The article, “On the Frontlines of Disaster” on the Canada’s History site tells more of the medical story in Halifax following the explosion, focussed on the efforts of another Aldershot physician, Dr. DeWitt. The article describes the conditions at Camp Hill, where Sisters of Charity nursed the wounded and dying. “Since the regular operating room in Camp Hill had not yet been fitted up, doctors performed surgery wherever they could find space. Temporary operating rooms were set up in the kitchen and dining room. The doctors operated on kitchen tables, and, in many cases, were forced to use kitchen utensils in lieu of surgical tools. And when surgical thread ran out, they resorted to using ordinary cotton thread to stitch up the wounds.” It is no surprise, reading this, that Dr. Killam did not speak of his experience, other than to tell his family of his relief that his brother and family members had survived.
I don’t know how long exactly Captain Harold Killam remained in Halifax, but I recall my grandmother saying that her father worked almost around the clock for several days, treating the wounded. A silent film available from the Nova Scotia Archives shows some of the relief and medical efforts amidst the devastation of the city, which was both burning and blanketed by snow immediately after the blast.
Despite their miraculous survival on Kaye Street, Fred and Rose Killam’s family was not untouched by death. In the aftermath of the explosion, Rose Killam lost their baby. Her grandfather, Major Theakston, still working at his mission to the poor in the city’s North End, also died as a result of injuries sustained in the explosion. The whole city’s recovery was arduous and the grief was intense.
Eventually, the Killam family rebuilt at Kaye Street and Nova Scotia Nursery, which must have been levelled in a lethal shower of glass (at least one of Fred Killam’s employees was killed), was re-opened. McAlpine’s Halifax City Directory for 1919-1920 lists the business in the same location, on the re-named Barrington Street (1086-1090 Barrington St.). Major Theakston’s North End Mission continued as well, under the direction of his fifth son, George W. Theakston.
Rev. Mr. Swetnam’s church on Kaye Street was also rebuilt, as a memorial to the victims of the disaster. It became the first congregation to bring together Methodist and Presbyterian worshippers in a “united church.” (Closed as a church, the building is now one of Canada’s most endangered historical sites.) And although she continued her work at the church and at home, Aunt Rose (like most other survivors, I imagine) was quietly said by some family members to never be the same again.
[1] The Nova Scotia Medical Journal, Volume 71, Number 4, August 1992. “Dr. Harold E. Killam, A Country Physician at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. First Years 1906-1918” Pages 147-153.
Root and Blade 