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Writer's pictureRick Epstein

Did Dr. Deemy's Horse Burn Half the Town?

Updated: Apr 26, 2020


Buildings that burned up: (clockwise from left) The Temperance House Hotel, The Press newspaper and print shop, and Hummer's furniture & Williams' drug stores.


Frenchtown Fire of 1878

Excerpt from “Rick's Frenchtown Encyclopedia” (a work in progress)

© 2020 by Rick Epstein


“It's a bad thing to have a fire engine that won't do what is required of it when most needed,” warned the Hunterdon Independent in 1871. The wisdom of this statement was demonstrated most egregiously seven years later.


A fire in May of 1876 seems to set the stage for the big one two years later.

At 10:15 p.m. John L. Slack and George Bunn saw a man come out of Gabriel L. Slater's hardware store (where Frenchtown Dog Wash is now) and hurry away on Bridge Street. Upon investigation, they found the front door unfastened and the third-story Masonic meeting hall on fire. They alerted the citizenry, who brought buckets of water to fight the fire. But it had spread up between the tin ceiling and the roof, beyond the throwing capacity of the bucket wielders.


Borough Clerk Silas S. Wright, who had been president of the short-lived Vigilant Fire Company, got the old Vigilant hand-pump working, and James E. Flagg was soon directing a stream of water into the ceiling to good effect. The fire was extinguished although the big meeting room was badly damaged. The Independent's criticism of the Vigilant seemed to be undeserved.


It was determined that the store's own resources had been turned against it. A watering can had been filled with kerosene downstairs for use as an accelerant, causing some to speculate that the incendiary was familiar with the store.


* * *

Two years later the Frenchtown Press would report:


“At a quarter before 1 o'clock on the morning of Saturday, June 29, 1878, while our inhabitants reposed in slumber, the cry of 'Fire!' was heard. Two hours thereafter nineteen places of business, six dwelling houses and twenty-one business firms were entirely burned out. The business centre was a mass of charred ruins. Thousands of dollars of valuable machinery was reduced to nothing. The sad havoc which the Press had so often predicted was completed. Thanks be to God no lives were destroyed. Fortunes were swept away, but life and limb were spared.”


The writer, Charles Joiner, wrote from the heart; his press and other equipment had been ruined – and he had let the insurance lapse.


* * *

The fire broke out in the barn of Emanuel K. Deemy, a physician and surgeon raising a family and practicing medicine in a rented house at 41 Bridge Street.

“Be it said to the credit of the ladies, they were the first to see the fire, and the first to make the alarm. Mrs. Charles A. Slack (Sarah) and Mrs. Emley Hyde (Thisby) both saw it at about the same time and gave the alarm. Mrs. Hyde by ringing the dinner bell thro' Temperance House and in the street. Mrs. A.P. Williams (Mary), who was staying with her sick mother on Bridge street, immediately ran up to her home on Fourth street shouting 'Fire!' all the way up Harrison street,” wrote the Independent.


Deemy's barn contained carriages, his horse, his cow, Levi Able's horse and a son's two white rabbits. Two more barns were adjacent – Thomas Able's barn and the bank's barn, which contained banker William Stover's horse. Running out in his nightshirt, Deemy managed to rescue his cow, and Stover saved his own horse. But two horses and the rabbits perished.


The Vigilant pumper was run out, but “the old dilapidated hand engine refused to throw a pint of water and was abandoned,” the Press noted bitterly.

At 1 a.m. Wilbur Slack sent a telegraph message to Lambertville that a fire engine was needed. At 1:14 Mayor Adam Haring added: “Send us an engine quick.” A pumper was mounted on a waiting flatcar and the intervening 16 miles were covered in 19 minutes, arriving here at 2:36 – in time to help confine the fire to buildings already burning.


The mayor had really put some oomph into his telegraph message to Phillipsburg: “Send engine, quick; whole town on fire.” But the message was not delivered properly and an hour was lost.


On a windless night, a fire goes in any direction that offers fuel.


IT SPREAD WEST from the stables into the abundant wood of the wheel, hub and spoke works of Hann & Williams. James Hann (1834-1922) and Edwin G. Williams (1842-1928) owned the property and employed 15 to 25 men. (The factory was where that beautiful victorian house is on Harrison Street about halfway between Bridge and Second.) They had a lot of stock on hand, some of it ready for shipment, so their losses were maximized. The factory's office in the former LaRoche house on the southeast corner of Second and Harrison. Upstairs was Miss Maggie A. Voorhees' private school.


From there, it spread east, west and south. To the east on Second Street was the Union National Bank, which was also the home of William S. and Mary Stover. Stover tended to horse and family and their personal goods, while bank president Philip G. Reading and teller Abel B. Haring were packing important papers in wooden boxes and taking them to safety. They toiled until fire and smoke drove them out of the bank. The money was in large safe, which was left behind in the blaze. Wilbur Slack's home on Second Street caught fire and the roof was badly burned before it was extinguished


Dr. Asher Reiley's barn would have given the fire a pathway eastward to Race Street, but men doused the barn with water, and that part of town was saved.

The fire went west, jumping Harrison Street to burn down the house on the corner of Lower Second Street. It belonged to retiree Samuel Pittenger (1798-1889) and his wife Amy (1819-1901). The uninsured Pittenger house collapsed into the street just behind, and barely missing, Charles Salter who was walking by.


Other houses along the northern edge of the fire were kept wet and suffered no more than blistered paint. They belonged to Charles Kline, Reuben Hillpot, Dr. Frank T. Eggert and Charles A. Slack. Other homes that were threatened by the fire, but suffered little damage were those of Aaron P. Kachline, William Alpaugh, William Smith, Thomas Able and W.H. Slater.


On the west side of Harrison Street, the fire burned toward Bridge Street, igniting the Temperance House's stables; and the small building that housed the Press newspaper and print shop upstairs and Kachline & Bro.'s meat shop downstairs; and the Temperance House hotel, which stood on the western corner of Bridge and Harrison streets.


The Press reported, “The hotel was full and (Emley Hyde) and his lady had just succeeded in working it up to a paying condition by dint of hard work, when the fire fiend enters upon his work of destruction. The dinner bell aroused the guests.”


George Salter and his father, Abner, rushed in to save some of the hotel furniture. Trying to exit, George found the back door blocked, so he ran through the burning hotel followed by a sheet of flame. At least that's how he remembered it 64 years later. Despite the efforts of the Salters and others, “almost the entire contents of the hotel were burned,” wrote the Press.


SPREADING SOUTHon the east side of Harrison, the fire attacked the adjoining holdings of Albert P. Williams, starting with Frank C. Miller's jewelry store; and John McIntyre's harness shop, with a manufacturer of bed bottoms upstairs; then William Smith's shoe shop and Joseph Hawk's meat store, with George Hummer's cabinet-making shop upstairs over the meat and shoe stores; then William S. Srope's legal office; and then the building on the corner that housed George Hummer's furniture store & undertaking establishment. Upstairs, the front room was Miss Mattie Hummer's dressmaking shop.


The Press has a manufacturer of “patent bed bottoms” (whatever they are) upstairs from the jewelry store, and makes no mention of harness-maker John McIntyre. But the Independent has McIntyre sharing the jewelry-store building, and occupying an upstairs room behind the dressmaking shop.


McIntyre was out of town, says the Independent, and lost his stored household goods, harness-making equipment, three sets of harness, all his clothing, $11 in silver, and his Union Army discharge papers. The Independent awarded him the unenviable distinction of being “the nearest burned out of everything than every other man who was touched by the fire.”


In the eastern half of the building, Williams' well-stocked drug store was destroyed, as was the upstairs photography studio of young A.A. Schofield, who had just arrived from Connecticut two months earlier. He managed to remove most of his equipment and materials in time, but left behind $17 in silver and cameras belonging to the Kachline brothers and A.P. Williams.


RAGING EASTon Bridge Street, the fire burned Levi Able's building, whose first story was brick, and top two levels were frame. It housed his barbershop, restaurant, bakery on the ground floor his family's living quarters upstairs. Only a 12-foot gap separated Able's unlikely lash-up of uses from the house that the Deemys were renting. When Able's building was ready to collapse, men pushed on the east wall so it would fall away from the Deemy house. Stone construction and the timely arrival of the Lambertville firefighters combined to save the Deemy house, thereby protecting the wooden buildings farther east. Even so, all the wood on the west wall of the house had turned to charcoal and $200 worth of repairs would be needed.


Meanwhile on the western front, the fire spread from the Temperance House consuming a row of four buildings that were, in order, Miss Lydia Stryker's millinery shop, James Osmun's residence, Mrs. Frances Stryker's residence and Daniel F. Moore's residence.


It tried to jump the alley and attack Hugh Warford's three-story brick residence, but carpets in the house were taken up, cut into strips, and draped over the wooden cornice on the hot side of the house. Men with ladders, ropes and buckets, worked in the blistering heat to keep the carpet well soaked, and the house was saved (only to be torn down in the early 1970s).


Although his residence was saved, Warford was the biggest loser that day. He owned all the buildings from the Samuel Pittenger house up to and including his residence – except for the Osmun residence in the row of four, which was owned by Levi Able.


On the south side of Bridge Street “...at Loux & Bunn's tin shop, H.H. Pittenger's store and dwelling, and Ishmael Brink's store and dwelling it was very hard and hot work to prevent those buildings from drawing the fire across the street. But brave men worked with a will and fought it as though they were working to save their very lives instead of their property. Mr. Wm. Gordon Jr., worked on the portico roof of H.H. Pittenger's residence (now the Book Garden), throwing water on the front of that building until the danger was over, when he fell back through the window into the house exhausted. In the fall he injured his shoulder and has been compelled to carry his arm in a sling since,” wrote the Independent.


The spread of the fire was also impeded by all of the street-side trees that were tall and in full leaf, providing a buffer.


RESCUING THE GOODS

“Nearly every household in the vicinity of the fire was turned inside out, and the streets were lined with article of housekeeping of every description until late in the forenoon, but of the many articles that were set without a watch over them, we have heard of no thefts,” the Independent reported.


Fargo noted that some of the items were carried to the other side of the creek, and the front lawn of 12 Bridge Street “was filled with household goods and personal effects of every description.”


Levi Able's barber chair was saved, which must have been small consolation; he lost two buildings, with insurance covering only half his losses. Two display cases, a soda fountain, prescription files, and two chandeliers were taken out of Williams' drug store, but $29 belonging to the Frenchtown Cornet Band burned up.


“To illustrate the strength of men under excitement,” wrote the Independent, “we will mention that four men carried a piano from H.H. Pittenger's residence to an alley in the rear, and it required ten men to return it after the excitement had died out.”


Brink's hardware store caught fire, but his friends put it out and kept the place soaked.


At 3:20 Phillipsburg firefighters telegraphed that their fire engines were ready to come south, but Frenchtown's station agent Bryan Hough advised, “Will not need engines. Fire is under control now.”


THE NEW DAY dawned to show several chimneys standing tall amid the smoking rubble. Borough Council treated the Lambertville firefighters to breakfast at the Railroad House (now the Frenchtown Inn) and National Hotel.

The bankers recovered their money, which had survived the flames in a safe, variously described as a Silas Herring (Press) and a Farrel & Herring (Independent).


A “hired girl,” employed in one of the buildings that would burn down, had put on her best dress, packed her valise and vanished. She re-appeared in the morning.


That day and the next the town was aswarm with sightseers, plus eager insurance agents and manufacturers of safes and fire engines. Milford photographer George W. Freeland came to capture the scenes of devastation. (No, I haven't seen those pictures, but I'm still looking.)


The Independent measured the burned frontage: Along Bridge Street for 240 feet; along Warford's Alley, 172 feet; on Second Street 159 feet; along Harrison Street (between Second and Bridge streets) 299 feet.


WHO DUNNIT?

“The origin of the fire is not positively known,” reported the Hunterdon Republican newspaper, “but it is supposed that it was the work of an incendiary as it broke out in a barn, where no fire or lights had been used.” That was the assessment of the Press, too.


But the Independent thought, “It might have been caused by one of the horses treading on a parlor match in the litter, or upon one of those paper caps which so many boys are using, or the casting of a cigar stump into a dry manure heap by some one who went to the water closet in the rear of Hann & Williams' factory, and which was used in the night as well as day time… we would rather believe it was from the latter causes than that of the incendiary's work.”


So Dr. Deemy's Horse is a suspect, just like Mrs. O'Leary's Cow was, after the Chicago Fire of 1871. But what about that “paper cap”? Cap pistols were indeed in use at that time. They had been invented right after the Civil War to help gun manufacturers survive peacetime. And the Deemys had two sons – John Saxton, 12, and Charles C., about 16.


It's probably unfair, but I like John Saxton (1866-1915) for the fire. Before video games replaced it, fire was a favorite plaything among growing boys.


Young Deemy grew up to be a physician, practicing in Frenchtown with his dad in the early 1890s before continuing his career in Bellefontaine, Ohio. The book “Memoirs of the Miami Valley” (1919) says, “Of great personal magnetism, Dr. Deemy attracted a large and devoted clientele, to which his cheery disposition and human sympathy increasingly endeared him, while his proficiency as a physician and surgeon won him enviable distinction in the profession... he had but one aim – the relief of human suffering.”


So, he was probably an upright lad who would never dream of burning down half his hometown. But accidents do happen.


In any case, after the fire, the Deemys moved out of their rented house on Bridge Street and into the house they owned at 9 Second Street. Maybe their landlady Emma Poulson didn't want the Deemy boy on the premises. But this is just speculation bordering on whimsy. Once repairs had been made, Poulson rented the house to Emley Hyde, so he could house his family and boarders, who had been displaced when the Temperance House burned down.


Ishmael Brink bought a little ad in the Independent thanking his friends and saying “it was through their exertions alone that my hardware store and dwelling were saved from the flames.”


AFTERMATH

Some businesses and people bounced back, and others didn't. The bounciest proved to be the Frenchtown Union Bank, which moved across the street to the northeast corner of Second and Harrison streets into a house recently vacated by George W. Bunn, and was open for business at 9 a.m. just eight hours after the first cry of “Fire!” In December the bank moved into a brand-new substantial brick edifice on Bridge Street. Druggist Albert Williams wasn't far behind, putting up a three-story brick building on his same site, and George Hummer's furniture and undertaking establishment moved right back in. But three years later, nothing else had risen from the ashes.


The hotel never came back. Nor did the Press. Although employee William Stout had secured the books, the press and other equipment were destroyed. Printer/journalist Charles Joiner had just let his insurance lapse after paying premiums for 10 years. So, as he put it, it was “a clean sweep.” Furthermore he had been in Trenton on the night of the fire, so he missed the terrible spectacle and had to rely entirely on others as he wrote the biggest story of his career. After the final edition of the Press was printed in Trenton, Joiner moved along, eventually settling in Allentown, N.J., where he became borough clerk while working as a printer.


Although there was no gloating in its fire coverage, the Independent had been engaged in an ugly rivalry with the Press. Frenchtown was a cramped arena for two print shops and two newspapers. With the Press burned out, the Independent would enjoy a monopoly. But that ended the following year with the advent of a new rival – William Sipes' Frenchtown Star.


Photographer Schofield went home to Connecticut, and harness-maker McIntyre thought he might set up shop in Erwinna, Pa.


The fire was the end of the Hann & Williams spoke factory, which was only one-quarter insured. One of the partners, Edwin G. Williams, who had been elected to Borough Council in '74, stayed in town, but he was no longer a captain of industry. He served briefly as borough clerk in '79. The 1880 Census lists him as a laborer, and in 1900 and 1920 he was a bank teller.


Two years later, Levi Able had just been proprietor of the Little York hotel and was about to take over a barbershop in Bloomsbury. In 1881 Kate Able sold the 39 Bridge Street lot to Lorenzo Kerr, who built a nearly identical addition to the Williams building there. Both halves look the same except the Kerr building has only one storefront and the bricks and mortar are slightly different. That's only proof of divided ownership. One-time owner David Miller says that a previous owner did a bad repointing job on the Kerr building.


* * *

This report owes a lot to Paul Tomko of the Frenchtown Inn who found and shared the Independent's detailed coverage of the fire.

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