On a related note ...
Tomorrow (April 18) is the 174th anniversary of the great fire that destroyed most of Kingston's downtown.
Today Kingston is known as "The Limestone City" because of the large number of limestone buildings downtown, but back in 1840 all the buildings were wood.
Anyway, on April 18, 1840 a fire broke out on a dock near City Hall. Without modern firefighting equipment the fire quickly spread to some ships, a bakery, and a warehouse.
There was a little problem with that warehouse.
You see there was a guy who happened to be the owner of 100 barrels of gunpowder. Normally, gunpowder could only be legally stored in a proper powder magazine for obvious safety reasons, but the guy was cheap and didn't want to pay the fees for storing the gunpowder properly ...
... so he stored it in a warehouse.
Anyway, you can do the math.
Fire + 100 barrels of gunpowder = X
Solve for X.So the warehouse was blasted to splinters and all the wooden buildings in a three or four block radius received a shower of flaming debris.
When the smoke finally cleared, most of downtown Kingston was gone, including City Hall and the buildings in Market Square.
The city did own much of the land in the devastated area, and was able to insist that the new replacement buildings be built out of limestone in order to reduce the threat of fire in the future, and hence Kingston came to be known as "The Limestone City".
It is funny that the movie production this week transformed Market Square into an appearance very much like what it would have looked like when it was destroyed 174 years ago this week.
{{EDIT:
Newspaper clipping from the period}}
