FREDERICKTOWN — A real photo postcard from Aug. 29, 1913, gives us a glimpse of the fire that wiped out a block of Fredericktown’s business district that day.
The day had been a typical enough Friday, busy with shoppers coming and going from the Cassell grocery store, two meat markets, two barber shops, and even “Beck’s racket store,” evidently a sporting goods retailer.
About 1:30 p.m., Harry Ward, proprietor of the Lewis & Ward clothing store wasconversing with Philip Brereton of Mount Vernon when the men noticed a wisp of smokedrifting into the room from the back hall.
They ran to the hall and rushed up the stairs, where they found flames in the northeast corner of the upstairs room. They sounded the fire alarm, then started filling buckets with water. The two of them tried to douse the flames, but the fire had already advanced too far for them to stop it.
The volunteer fire squad quickly gathered, but according to newspaper reports following the incident, they lacked clear leadership and wasted the early moments of the fire directing a spray of water onto the roof of the building and not onto the actual fire itself. It turned out that this roof technique did nothing to save a building that was already doomed.
Within the block, the fire was already spreading from building to building, for these were all old, almost entirely wooden structures.
As it became clear that the entire block was in jeopardy, onlookers quickly volunteered their services. People started transferring the clothing store stock into a building across the street.
Choice cuts of meat and sports rackets were piled in the street until temporary housing could be found. The fire would have been much worse if these spontaneous volunteers hadn’t helped the staff of Hosack’s Drugstore move oil lamp fuel and kerosene out of that store before the flames arrived.
The article in the Democratic Banner also states that one of the fortunately moved items from the drug store was explosives. Explosives? Seems like an extreme treatment for athlete’s foot, if you ask me.
Jokes were actually heard quite a bit as the gathered crowd dealt with their nerves about the fire, which was being fed by a brisk easterly wind. The blaze threatened to destroy a significant portion of town. Some onlookers joked about how they should have left the meat in the butcher shops until it was nicely browned.
Other men proclaimed their relief that since the town’s two barber shops were going up in flames, they’d no longer have to get haircuts or shaves. But this jocularity masked the serious concern about the fire’s spread.
The ineffective early fighting of the fire got a whole lot worse when the available water from the town’s relatively small water tower ran out. The firefighters then put their hoses into the water cisterns of a couple of the buildings, but that water quickly ran out as volunteers from the crowd took turns operating the hand pumper.
Just as the flames reached a new level of danger, backup arrived from Mount Vernon, and the Mount Vernon fire chief, U.G. Pickard, took charge of the fight.
He had presumably arrived with his horse-drawn tankers, because the newspaper pointed out the novelty that there was also “an automobile truck” that carried lengths of hose which could be run down to the creek to provide an unending supply of water.
Pickard quickly identified that the initial block was a total loss, and directed the crews to spray down the walls of surrounding buildings to keep the fire from spreading.
This strategy was what saved the day. On one side of the conflagration was the Jones Livery and feed barn. Next to that was the large C. M. Hildreth warehouse. Pickard calculated that if the livery caught fire, it would surely spread to the huge warehouse, and if the warehouse caught fire, Fredericktown’s entire downtown was doomed.
When flames began licking the livery, Pickard brought every stream available to bear on the barn, smothering the flames and saving much of the town’s business district.
Even as it was, the disaster took out an entire block and cost an estimated $50,000 in damages — a huge sum of money in those days, when–by comparison–a year’s subscription to the newspaper cost $1.50. The Banner reported that the building owners figured that, collectively, they had only about a quarter of that in insurance coverage, but nonetheless planned to rebuild.
Destroyed were:
The Carl Walters barber shop.
The Clyde Harris meat market.
The F. F. Hosack drug store.
The Lewis & Ward clothing store.
The Harry Howard ice cream parlor.
The H. E. Cassell grocery.
The Thomas Miller barber shop.
The Fox Brothers’ meat market.
The M. T. Beck racket store.
The Knights of Pythias Hall.
Firefighters and volunteer citizens helping move things had a few close calls with collapsing walls during the fire, but, remarkably, no one was injured, and by late afternoon, the situation was under control.
It was the worst fire disaster in Fredericktown history, but one that could have been much, much worse.
