USA > Vermont > Windham County > Rockingham > History of the town of Rockingham, Vermont, including the villages of Bellows Falls, Saxtons River, Rockingham, Cambridgeport and Bartonsville, 1907-1957 with family genealogies > Part 35
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1906. One of the first bad fires after the turn of the cen- tury was on Christmas Day when the old Brown block on Canal Street was gutted in bitter zero weather that sheathed everything in ice as fast as water was pumped onto the flames. It started in the Come-Eat-A-Lunch room and when Fire Chief Gately arrived, he pulled in four alarms, calling all fire- men out of bed. Before it was controlled, damage to the extent of $14,000 had ruined the lunchroom, a cobbler shop, Byrne's barber shop, the Stuart Bakery, Baldasaro's fruit store and Exner & Holmes Tobacco store.
1907. While the Brown block was being rebuilt, another fire in it the next December nearly cost the life of a well-known resident. A workman, drawing gasoline from a 5-gallon can into a lantern, set the container on fire and rushed from the building. The blaze communicated itself at once to the com- bustible materials about the place. While some rushed for
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fire extinguishers from Field & Lawrence and the Hotel: Wind- ham, Henry Blake dashed from his fish market across the street, picked up the can of blazing oil and raced into the street with it, making an inferno of himself. Someone yelled to him to jump into the canal which he did, without stopping to reflect that he had never learned to swim. However, he surfaced near a tree which stopped his progress toward the canal gates. He was badly burned but lived to be an old man and tell of his experience. He was the son of Seth Blake, a dentist of the 1850's and carried on both a fish and flower market. His father, at his home on Atkinson Street, built one of the most powerful telescopes in Vermont in a tower room which was removed during the occupancy of George Dickinson many years later.
1907. Another spectacular fire that same year was at the Island House bought by the Bellows Falls Machine Co from C. W. Osgood in 1899. This consisted of two fires and caused much criticism of the fire department for lack of men; of 65 volunteers, only 15 responded and the steamer didn't work for lack of coal for there was only two bushel in the engine house and more had to be gotten hastily from the sheds of Howard Hardware. Three times the laboring engine "went down" for lack of fuel. The first fire started in the afternoon in the office of the Gobie printing plant from a kerosene stove attached to the monotype machine. The fire boys got it under control easily and went home to relax. They didn't consider that it even needed a watchman. About 12:30, that night the Fire Chief got word that the Island House was on fire again and this time it did a good job, cleaning out the Bellows Falls Machine Co., P. H. Gobie, the stock and printed matter of the Vermont Farm Machine Co, and Simons, Hatch & Whitney, the overall factory. Closed as a hotel in 1887 after a period as one of the most famous hostelries in the area, it was now nothing but a shell. The town felt that it needed better fire protection and the fire department was called on the carpet by the trustees. Today, rebuilt, it is used for storage and there is little to remind anyone of the fine hotel with the tall white pillars to which came guests from miles away to benefit from the salubrious water of the Abenaqui Springs on the Cold River Road.
1911. On February 16, a $40,000 fire wiped out the Walter C. Hadley Co. harness shop on Canal Street, storehouse and three houses and threatened the Hotel Rockingham and Wheeler's Laundry.
1912. On the night of March 28, on the coldest night of the year, when the mercury dropped to 14 below, the whole east side of the Square went up in smoke in the worst conflagration the village had ever known, with a quarter of a million dollars loss. Wiped out were Richardson Bros. shoe store, W. H. Bodine & Co., Collins & Floyd, jewelers, M. K. Holmes Co. Later the pages of the TIMES were plastered with fire' sales of
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these firms. Mason Bros. music store, two drug stores, several professional offices, Co. E. Armory and Union Hall, all dis- appeared. The fire was discovered by Mrs. Mary Marden, storekeeper at the hotel who smelled smoke at 2 a. m. and getting out of bed, saw smoke coming from the back of the Union block. Patrolman Angus McKinnon saw the smoke at the same time that the alarm was turned in at the hotel and found the Union block filled with it. It took three alarms be- fore a dozen fire hoses were on the spot, fighting the flames. There was no fire wall into the Arms block but the one at the hotel checked the fire there for a time only to have it break through a window and the four-story building was doomed, the third time that a hostelry upon this site was burned. It took much hard work to prevent the fire from sweeping down the whole length of Canal Street, and wiping out half the busi- ness district. Pictures taken the next day show the whole east side of the street coated with ice.
Among the offices destroyed was that of Bolles & Bolles. A. I. Bolles started for the Square at once that night and later his brother, E. C. phoned Almon's wife, asking where he was. Panic stricken and seeing him trapped in his burning office, Mrs. Bolles started running down the hill from their home on Wil- liams Terrace in the cold so bitter that she says it cut her lungs like a knife. At the fire, distracted, she asked this person and that if they had seen her husband. But no one had. She tried to hold onto herself as she pushed through the crowds, the water, ice and firemen. At the height of her despair, someone told her that A. I. and his brother were both in the alley behind the hotel, helping push the fire horses up the icy slope! Which was where she found them, one pushing, the other pulling. They got all the law books out of the office but they were so wet that it took days to open them, a page at a time, and dry them.
1916. Each May, for many years, might be said to have been forest fire time as fires regularly started along the railroad tracks from sparks from the locomotives. Woods fires, you might say, were all the rage each spring-at least they raged annually, from one cause or another. This year a vicious fire started where men were getting out wood on the Lovell land on the Missing Link Road, threatening for a time to wipe out several farms and all the cottages on the river. A strong southwind turned the fire into a blazing inferno which swept across the road toward the Herrick farm, taking with it a building on the Divoll land and sending billows of smoke toward the camps on the river until hope for them was given up. Fire fighters from Springfield, Charlestown and Bellows Falls were called out and while the river camps escaped, sparks crossed half a mile of water and started blazes on farms in Charlestown, N. H. Thou- sands of dollars damage was done and excitment was so great
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that every automobile in town was offered to carry men to fight the fire.
1917. On May 4 the unrest in the paper mills was aug- mented by a big fire which destroyed the Liberty Paper Co. in the old 200-ft. long Casein building built in 1893 for the Casein Company of America and bought by the Liberty in 1913. The noon train was stopped by the flames at the Blake & Higgins mill and it was always remembered as the worst fire in town up to that time, even exceeding the hotel fire in 1912.
1919. The fire in the Times block on November 12, started in the Boston Lunch on the first floor and burned up part of the next day's issue which appeared only a day late with a story of the fire on the front page. Shrunken in size, it was printed on the Gobie presses.
1921. In a tragic fire in February at the Phelps House on School Street, three small children were burned to death when their mother could not get back into the room which was heated by a coal stove after going out to answer the telephone. The baby was rescued but died in the hospital. It is thought that the children ignited a magazine at the stove. That same year the depot burned to the ground with $75,000 damage and a 60-mile gale on a December night with the thermometer drop- ping to 10-15 below zero. Destroyed were waiting rooms, the American Express office, restaurant, baggage rooms and the Western Union office. The station was used by the B&M and Rutland Railroad and Central Vermont. Starting in the kitchen of the restaurant, everything was gone in half an hour. The wind was so strong that it blew the water back from the hoses. The Freight and Express buildings were saved.
1925. This was the year of the two big fires which seriously upset the budget of the town. In the early morning hours of Sunday, May 10, the Town Hall building in the Square, or the Opera House, went up in flames with a loss of over $200,000. In the building was the F. G. Pierce store which lost everything and the Post Office from which little was saved except the mail which had come in the night before. The sudden loss of the Opera House, Post Office and Banquet Hall below it as well as various offices and shops, was a serious blow to the town.
Upstairs in the three-story brick and steel structure, built along architectural lines long out-dated, was the Eugene Leonard Insurance office and that of Judge O'Brien. Records of the Municipal Court were removed by Sylvester Tidd and Jack Pickett via ladders while Eugene Leonard, Jr., pushed another ladder up to the insurance office and climbed in that way, re- moving most of the records and files. Jack Pickett did heroic work until he was ordered out of the danger zone. This fire removed the town's largest public building, built in the summer and fall of 1887. In July of that year the U. S. Post Office moved into it, having been trolleyed around to various locations.
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The Woman's Club rented Banquet Hall and L. S. Hayes, town clerk, had moved into the ground floor when the library went into its new home in 1910. On the third floor were the Moose, Grange, Daisy Circle, Railway Trainmen and the New England Order of Protection.
The fire was discovered about 2:15 a.m. by Dan Cray, Jr., who noticed puffs of smoke around the front door. Several people had passed the building moments before including Police Chief Tracy, Night Officer Diekamper, Automobile Inspector Marsh and Edward Barrett who had just come in from Boston. Cray rang in the alarm from Box 12 in the Square and firemen found the halls already filled with smoke and the whole basement ablaze. After three streams of water had been played on the building by Fire Chief Grignon, the worst seemed over and the tenants who had been contacted by phone, abated their anxieties and activities. Suddenly the flames shot up through partitions and ventilating shafts to the roof and everyone realized that the Opera House was doomed as red hot slates flew through the air. Furious attempts were made to remove the contents of the Pierce store, Post Office and movie records from the Latchis theater. But most of it was in vain. In the Pierce store, now owned by George Page, was Margaret Bolles' new brown suit- case, waiting for her initials which was to accompany her to Europe. Mr. Pierce couldn't get another one like it so she started.on her voyage with a black bag which was so conspicuous on the mountain of brown luggage at every stop all summer that every custom official always pounced on that one to examine first!
Because of the many air pockets and shafts with few inter- vening walls, the whole thing was over in an incredibly short time and at 3 o'clock the town clock in the tower struck for the last time, valiantly calling the hours amid flames and smoke with the whole tower ablaze. It was the swan song of the Opera House. As the tower dropped bit by bit to the sidewalk, the old clock, in one last burst of glory, its bell glowing in a mass of fire, dropped into the inferno below. By 5 o'clock there was only a smouldering ruin and the last spark was not extinguished until Sunday afternoon.
The replacement of the building was adjudged to be around $150,000. Postmaster Blakely said the government loss in supplies and fixtures would be only a few thousand dollars and the Woman's Club's biggest item was their piano but added to this were the many offices and lodge rooms. Mr. Hayes' office suffered excessively from fire and water and many unbound copies of his Town History were badly water soaked. Someone figured that these damages would add up to another $30,000. Several offices and stores had been there since the building was built including the Pierce store, E. S. Leonard and George Weston's Law office on the top floor, then occupied by D. H.
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Cray and the Strout Real Estate Agency. Other tenants were once Dr. Elmer, Dr. Eddy and Dr. Parker, dentists; Charles Labaree and C. H. Robb, lawyers.
When the Town Hall was built, it was a pretty fine building. The TIMES said of it at that time that "the new Town Hall is one of the finest buildings in the state and there are probably not more than two or three halls in Vermont that will comprare with it." It had a floor that could be raised or lowered for dances, probably leveling it off and you always stepped over a big crack in the floor when you went to a play or the movies. But the powers-that-be forgot that all the seats would have to be removed for a dance-which were bolted down. Or maybe they planned on settees. But the auditorium was never used for dancing. They opened that first Town Hall in grand style with the famous Mary Howe of Brattleboro to christen it with her golden voice for this was to be a real opera house and was always so called. When the new hall was opened in 1926, it was celebrated with a movie.
The burned-out occupants immediately located elsewhere in town. Mr. Hayes moved into the Municipal building on Rockingham Street. His valuable collection of historical data was damaged in the vault and copies of the Town History were spread out to dry in the Bellows Falls Savings institution. The selectmen held several meetings to consider rebuilding and it was finally voted to do this at once, at a special village meeting held the next month. But not before the town was torn into two factions with each side voicing its reasons for and against. Some suggested a memorial to the American Legion. Dr. Hill claimed that "from the day it was opened until the fire nobody in town had a good word for it." He reminded the town that it had been erected "for the future" and turned out to be nothing but an expense all the time and that the new $200,000 building would cost $10,000 a year. The editor of the TIMES objected to any further use of the hall for moving pictures and Dr. Hill suggested, later that year when another catastrophe had hit the town, that the new high school with which the voters were also faced, could be large enough for graduations instead of putting this hall into the new building in the Square. As it turned out, the result of having to build two edifices at once, in the snowstorm of expenses, Peter was robbed to pay Paul and one wing of the high school was deleted from the plans, an error keenly felt twenty years later.
Father John Currier was against renting any part of the building "to business concerns or private enterprise of any kind." But the net result was a larger and finer building today, housing the town clerk with a fireproof vault for all records and vital statistics; offices for the town manager and a large audi- torium. George Page's Men's store and John Fletcher's news- stand and cafeteria occupy the ground floor and the Woman's
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Club has its own rooms in the basement as well as public rest rooms. And when it was completed Charles Vilas of Alstead, the good angel of this area, donator of the new bridge to replace the Tucker Toll Birdge, presented the town with a new clock to replace the old one. This was started on July 23, 1927. The first clock was given April, 1901 by the heirs and friends of two Scotsmen, Daniel Campbell and John Robertson and the in- scription over the new Town Hall reads 1752-1926. The build- ing committee for the new structure included A. I. Bolles, chair- man; Dr. J. T. Rudden, W. W. Hall and John P. Lawrence plus Selectmen Stoddard, Frost and Thompson. Later a special committee was appointed as some felt that three months of deliberation and three special town meetings had gotten nowhere This new committee consisted of F. H. Babbitt, Charles Higgins and Walter Glynn.
The Bellows Falls High School burned November 26, 1925 at 6:30 a. m. Built in 1896 at a cost of $50,000 and reno- vated in 1919 to the amount of $15,000 more, it went up in flames so fast that Wednesday morning, crumbling into ashes while you watched, that people shuddered to think of what might have happened at some other hour of the day. At 9 a. m. it was gone.
Discovered by the janitor, Charles Fuller, under the stairs and probably from defective wiring, the flames shot to the roof through the many ventilating shafts. Firemen struggled vainly to throw water to the second story windows with no pressure, demonstrating that besides paying for two new town buildings in one year, modern fire apparatus was also needed. All books and apparatus were destroyed with insurance of $96,000. Select- men called a special meeting for December 8 at which it was voted to start building at once. On November 20 a special town meeting had been held to vote to build a new town hall. At this meeting Dr. Osgood had remarked that the town was spending too much money and that he expected, any day, to hear that the high school had burned down too! He also added that the Arch Bridge would doubtless be washed down- stream and that the community spenders would want to build a cement bridge to Chester. (But that was Calamity Week in Bellows Falls with a boy killed on the railroad, Alstead had a $40,000 fire, two people drowned in Saxtons River, a girl fell to her death and someone broke an arm.) The town voted to
build a $275,000 high school of 24 rooms. The building com- mittee chosen consisted of F. H. Babbitt, Dr. A. L. Miner and Walter Glynn and there were no complaints this time. Classes met in the vestries of the various churches and the Armory, carrying on without books at first.
1931. When the Star Theater, now the Crayco Hotel, burned, it removed also Rugg's Trucking, Fred Lewis' jewelry store, Mrs. Olive Davenport's beauty shop, Page's barber shop,
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Fletcher's newsstand, the Washington Candy Co. and the United Cigar store. Owned by the Suter Estate, the land was leased by S. J. Cray.
1932. For the fourth time the Hotel Windham, or a hostelry upon that site, succumbed to flames on April 5, doing $175,000 damage. Discovered shortly after midnight by Clif- ford Patterson, hotel manager and Mrs. Katherine Curran, proprietor, 44 guests left the building and everyone had time to collect their belongings. Three people were removed by fire- men by ladders, two guests from the top floor and Mrs. Dascomb, an elderly woman from the second floor. No one was sure where it started but it seemed to have originated in an unoccupied room on the second floor where it worked its way through the partitions to the ground floor. Five stores on the first floor were wiped out together with the hotel dining room and lobby. For awhile it seemed to onlookers and firemen, that neighboring blocks including the Star Hotel, the old Bellows Falls Times block which had burned a year ago and the Corner Drug store beside it, would also go.
At noon the next day the ruins still smouldered and fire- men began the dangerous task of pulling down the walls that were in danger of toppling. When it was all over there was only the rear wing of the hotel standing, charred and blackened and only part of the lobby furniture saved. Built snugly into the business district, it was a terrifying ordeal as sparks flew and timbers crashed but valiant work on the part of the firemen, prevented a holocaust. The shops on the street level destroyed were the C. C. Collins, jewelry store; E. S. Whitcomb, dry goods; Western Union Telegraph, office; Vermont Paint and Paper Store and Hodgdon & Shaw, drugs. A fire wall between the hotel property and the MacLennan block saved the latter. The hotel was rebuilt at once with the firm of Harper & West as architects and reopened in May of the next year. Clifford Patterson returned as manager.
1941. The Bragg Lumber Co. storehouse and adjoining buildings burned with a $10,000 loss while hundreds of specta- tors lined Hyde and Tuttle Street. In the building were 200,000 feet of lumber and 10,000 feet in the yard which was ruined. Carpenter & McArdle had their upstairs and storage room damaged to the extent of $1,000 and Smith Auto had their ware- house damaged to $3,700 while cars inside added another $500. Sparks traveled hundreds of feet in the Air and buildings facing the inferno had the paint blistered from their clapboards.
1944. The First National Store went up in flames in January along with the Reliable Bargain Store, both owned by the J. H. Blakely estate and probably starting in the boilerroom of the Reliable Bargain. The worst fire in ten years, it broke out with an explosion in the grocery store which blew out a big front window. The heat cracked the windows in Fletcher's
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news store in the Opera House building across the alley.
1946. The old icehouse on the Pond Road burned one July night and spelled an end to the ice business in town for all time. It was a bad fire with apparatus having a hard time negotiating the narrow road to the Pond but 6 lines of hose went into play as the black smoke billowed high in the air. There was still ice in the sawdust when the roof collapsed as the men chopped a hole in it for the hoses, throwing three men into a strange inferno below which was both hot and cold. Seven men were injured, causing an adjustment in insurance for fire department men. With half the summer's ice still in the house, there was a shortage of that commodity that summer and to top the climax, the ice company's truck caught fire the next week. As the TIMES said, "the fire gods frown on ice."
1948. There have always been fires on Fall Mountain, usually in May. These are difficult to handle with the terrain such as it is, steep and rocky. In August of this year, during an unusually dry summer, a two week fire burned the back side of the mountain in dry brush and slash. It went over the Langdon town line and men from both Vermont and New Hampshire were on duty with the Red Cross mobile unit serving food. Until the first soaking rain, an air patrol was kept up by Langdon, flying over the mountain every few hours. This fire cost New Hampshire $10,000 and Bellows Falls was filled with smoke for many days.
1952. On November 4, the night before deer season opened, when hotels were jammed with hunters, a bad fire swept the west side of the Island practically bare. (One stranger at the Crayco Hotel, who did not get out of bed to look out, said that Bellows Falls was about the noisiest place he had ever been in, with people and cars raising a ruckus under his window all night. But coming from Czechoslovakia, he had probably seen worse.) This fire put many firms out of business including Saratoga Plastics, H. P. Hood & Sons, Vermont Poultry, Inc. and Cords & Cables. Carl Parker, realtor, was part owner of these build- ings, once the Vermont Farm Machine Co. At this time the unsuccessful building fund drive was opened but the Island has been cleaned up and some industries re-located including Cords & Cables. Saratoga Plastics moved to North Walpole and the Parker and Dymond chicken business found quarters in Walpole.
1957. During a terrifically dry spring, with no rain for weeks, the worst forest fire in Rockingham for many years, started on the railroad tracks behind the country club and burned over 40 acres of land belonging to Frank Weeden and Elbert Blodgett, just missing large stands of pine. For over 8 hours, 150 men climbed the mountain side in the explosively dry woods.
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In the winter of 1925 occurred the first of several earth- quakes, one upheaval of nature which Vermonters had never figured to contend with-until they learned that New England was in an earthquake "fault" extending to the St. Lawrence Valley. Taking place at night, this quake frightened the town out of its collective wits, shaking pictures from the walls and banging doors back and forth. At the author's house, north of the village on a rocky foundation where it was customary to feel the bed shake when trains passed, there was no excitement .. To many, the end of the world appeared to have arrived. The next quake took place December, 1940 and the picture was repeated on a more violent scope with furniture dancing around and everything loose, banging and crashing. It lasted only two minutes but most of the town was out of bed at 2:20 that morning. Another tremor took place an hour later so that most people never went back to bed at all but sat up, expecting the worst. Arthur Elias had most of his Dutch Treat restau- rant on the floor that morning and a Rockingham family rushed out to the barn and spent the rest of the night in the hay, evi- dently believing that barns were impervious to earthquakes. A week later it happened all over again at 8 in the morning with less damage to homes and nerves although many wondered if Vermont was going to be in a class with California. A few slight tremors have been felt since, the latest in the spring of 1958.
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