Editor’s Note: The following was written by American Journal founder Harry Foote, who reported on the Fire of ’47 for the Evening Express newspaper in Portland. Foote, now 92, lives in Portland. His son, Raymond Foote, helped to write the following memoir.

I remember particularly a woman, completely burned out, lamenting the loss of all the preserves she had lovingly put up.

I met her in one of the shelters set up after the fires. She was cataloging how many jars of just what she had canned and lost. Not from a list, just from her heart. Canning season was fresh in her mind, it had just finished up when the fires came.

One particularly graphic memory that I described in the paper was of a plume of smoke, looking from the air like a massive feather laid across miles of York County, a massive feather with a thicker head where the fire was burning most briskly at the southeastern end. The white head of smoke rising over that briskly blazing part of the fire, then being blown off like a tail so it looked like a feather laid over the land.

But besides that smoke, there was a lot of other smoke being generated throughout the area. Much of York County had burned, some of that was still burning, and more still was yet to burn.

Guy P. Gannett, my employer and owner of the Portland Press Herald, the Evening Express, the Sunday Telegram, the Kennebec Journal and the Waterville Sentinel, owned I think seven airplanes, and used them in part to provide air photographs that graced the pages of those papers.

It was from one of those planes that I got my view of the feather of smoke. As it became clear that this was a major news event, the aerial photography came in, and I rode along to give an eyewitness word picture of it, too.

At the time I was a Portland reporter, reassigned to the fires. On a particular day, you’d go to the assignment book as you started the eight hour day and find out what you were supposed to do – the waterfront, police, courts, City Hall, the various beats.

The fires? I don’t think of it as even a week, maybe it was – several days, anyway.

I remember Emil, Emil Labbe I think it was, one of the Gannett pilots. And Milton Smith, I think of Gardiner Roberts, who was chief photographer, and I guess Gard must have been along.

I threw up in the plane once as the pilot twisted and turned to get good angles for photos.

I remember burned-out farms, and seeing stacks of heirloom furniture and also valued farm equipment, set out in driveways, unburnt. They set it out there where they had a chance of saving it even if the buildings burned.

The 1978 book “Wildfire Loose,” by Joyce Butler, combines material from many sources to tell the story of the fires that swept Maine that week of Oct. 19, 1947. The book says it was a long, dry, warm fall, so dry the soil was like powder and farmers hadn’t been able to do their fall plowing: The sod was so dry it wouldn’t hold together to be flipped over by the plow to make the furrows. It includes direct quotation from a story I wrote, of an evening flight on Oct. 21 with Milton Smith over the North Kennebunkport fire, one of the first big blazes. It appeared in the Press Herald the next morning, and I’ll quote from it here:

“Ahead of us rose a long sweeping curve of rosy-tinted smoke. We approached at about 1,800 feet altitude. The air, clear over Portland, soon grew foggy with smoke.”

Ahead as we passed over Biddeford, we saw “a wide curving arc of flames…eating steadily nearer and nearer to the bright, blinking lights of the city…It was burning virtually unchecked, and along so long a line that a shift of wind could have sent it quickly sweeping in on the southwest side of Biddeford hardly more than a mile away.”

To the west “was a bright but broken line of flame in the town of North Kennebunkport (modern Arundel, that is). It marked the back side of the fire, the general area where it gained its start Monday afternoon. It still had plenty of life.”

Flying over the grey no-man’s land of already-burned acreage between the North Kennebunkport fire front and its southern front in Kennebunkport, we saw no house lights blinking in the charred landscape, only, here and there, “winking orange dots of fire scattered across it.”

Then we saw “for the first time the full face of the fire. In a long straight unbroken line that ran southeast to northwest, the fire was eating its way south,” a line eight miles long, with the smoke cloud rising 7,000 to 8,000 feet at the coast.

At Cape Porpoise, a house was burning: “The flames were going straight up, sucked up by the draft of the roaring woods around it.”

Then, in another pass, lower at 600 feet, the plane “bounced and shook in the rough hot air from the fire,” and we could see that the fire had jumped 100 feet to yet another house, and in other places had jumped out in front of itself as much as 300 yards to ignite patches of brush and trees.

I carried with me on these flights a topographic map or maps, on which I used a pencil to show the approximate fire line and other points of fire and danger.

Was I afraid for my safety flying above the flames in a small plane? No. I was excited, challenged. There were never any feelings of doubt in the Gannett enterprise.

After the fires were out, the reporting involved interviewing the burned-out people, at the shelters set up in gyms and halls, sleeping on cots, no private rooms.

Across much of York County and southern Oxford County, there was nothing left that amounted to anything. All the trees had pretty much burned.

The Feds were fairly quick with help. Quonset huts, for instance. Probably 30 or 40 were set up, one per family, for shelter.

Everybody sensed a great loss. It was a bad, bad thing. Nobody was able really to stop it. The wind was blowing hard, for several days.

There was dismay at the barrenness of the miles and miles of York County that had been swept by the flames.

But the sense after it was over was a determination to make things right again: “We’ve got a big job ahead of us. Let’s get to it.”