Valley News – Looking back: Witnesses remember the Great Fire of Lebanon in 1964

LEBANON — Most people have a few events in their memory that they will never lose track of, days like November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, or September 11, 2001, when terrorists crashed airliners. the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They will remember what they were doing when the news broke, where they were, who told them about it, what their reactions were at the time.

Anyone who was in the Upper Valley on Friday, June 19, 1964, will likely have an indelible memory of the Great Lebanon Fire that day, a time when much of the city's downtown area was razed, 20 businesses were destroyed and a life was lost. It was the afternoon of a beautiful early summer day and life in the community still had a leisurely rhythm that had not changed much in a generation.

Downtown Lebanon was home to an eclectic mix of stores so typical of New England towns before the big box era arrived: hardware stores, jewelers, banks, drug stores, paint and wallpaper stores, and grocery stores. , newsstand, several restaurants. It also included a propane dealer, a funeral home and a welding shop. Occasionally, trains ran along the Boston and Maine railroad tracks that passed through the area.

That afternoon, Terry Lacasse was washing his car in the backyard of the family home on Meriden Road. Having just graduated from Lebanon High School, he was waiting to be sent to attend Army basic training. He had turned on the car radio and suddenly it broadcast the news that a fire had broken out in downtown Lebanon. Lacasse jumped into the vehicle and headed towards the scene.

He stopped along the way and picked up Wally Tucker, a Grafton County deputy sheriff. A police blockade had been set up on School Street, but when Tucker showed his lawman's badge, they were asked to pass. On arrival at the scene, they were invited to join a group of men removing paint from Fletcher's paint shop and then goods from the jewelry store next door. But the fire was spreading and intensifying by the minute and in an instant they were running for their lives, a scene captured in an iconic photograph taken by Larry McDonald of the Valley News.

Lacasse remembers watching from a distance as the roaring inferno and its enormous column of smoke moved up Hanover Street toward Colburn Park. Fire trucks from across the region were pouring water on the blaze, which appeared poised to engulf Lebanon's entire city center, but when it destroyed wooden buildings and slammed into brick walls and the jets of water drawn from the Mascoma River and the city. fire hydrants, his advance slowed and then stopped.

After his military service, Lacasse would become a fixture in the automobile sales industry in the Upper Valley for half a century. His memories of that day of devastation are as vivid today as they were immediately after Lebanon's largest fire.

Dave Jones, 11, was shopping with his mother at Tom's Toggery, a clothing store on Hanover Street, when someone came in and announced that a fire was in progress behind the store. Jones and his mother ran to the nearby wooden bridge over the railroad tracks where they observed flames and when they saw a transformer exploding, they ran. Later that afternoon, Jones and several friends climbed to the top of the 40-meter ski jump on Storrs Hill and watched the fire, often through a telescope that one of them had brought .

Jones, a scion of a prominent Lebanese law family, is retired in Connecticut after a career in sales. Watching from a distance, he and his friends quickly realized they were watching a huge fire, he recalled.

Stephanie Jackson was employed as an assistant to the chair of the psychology department at Dartmouth College. She left work that afternoon for her usual walk on Rt. 120 to the family home on Prospect Street in Lebanon. But she would be stopped by the police on Summer Street who would tell her about the fire that had ravaged much of the city center, a subject she had not heard about at work.

She detoured around the scene of the fire via Heater Road and Riverdale and when she arrived home, she discovered that her father, Frank Jackson, was at the H. W. Carter factory on Bank Street. He was the owner of the company, which manufactured the venerable “Watch the Wear” line of denim overalls, dresses and other workwear. The Carter Building (now home to the AVA Gallery) was a wooden structure and he feared that sparks thrown from the fire a few hundred yards away could easily ignite the old building, but this did not happen. not produced.

After a career in social service organizations around the world, Jackson, now a resident of Canterbury, New Hampshire, says it still seems remarkable to her that the community has never directed anger, hostility or hatred for the man who was ultimately convicted of starting the fire. This man “was an idiot,” she said, and that’s why the community saw no value in demonizing him.

Jim Vanier was 11 years old and in a full body cast after suffering a fractured femur. He was part of a family of six boys and three girls living on School Street. With his limited mobility, he could not observe the fire himself, but he could see and smell the smoke. He said he knew right away it was going to be serious because of all the wood frame structures downtown.

Lester Bouchier of Meriden, a retired postal worker, has many snippets of memories from that day. He was pumping gas for Manchester Gulf on Hanover's South Main Street when he saw trucks coming out of the town's fire station. He heard “Fire in Lebanon” on the radio and continued his work. As news of the enormity of the fire spread, he took a circuitous route to the scene.

He remembers emotions of disbelief when he learned that the Lewis Brothers hardware store had been consumed. He saw employees of the E. Cummings Leather tannery on High Street on its roof wetting the surface. It recalls the heroism of Albert Herrin who saved a man on the verge of perishing in the flames.

Bev Metcalf remembers her husband, Lang, rushing to help at the scene of the fire, where he ended up controlling traffic. She walked up High Street, past Bashaw and Heath Markets and the tannery to look at the devastation across the Mascoma River. She turned around as dusk fell – a neighborhood she said was dark, smoky and scary.

Jack Lebrun was at work as a surveyor for the New Hampshire Highway Department that afternoon, but returned home to his Eldridge Street home in time to witness the end of the fire from the steps of the Catholic church. Later, his team of surveyors was mobilized to help locate the body of the fire's only victim in the smoldering ruins.

Sheila Stone was shopping for a car in Claremont with her mother and stepfather when they heard a radio report about a fire in progress in Lebanon. This didn't seem like a matter of concern at the time, but upon returning home they learned otherwise. Stone, a former Plainfield dairy farmer now residing in West Lebanon, explains how different the means of communication were in 1964 from today's saturation of social media and cell phones. Local radio and word of mouth were then the main channels of information.

Dan Perrier was a Hanover firefighter and ended up being on duty at the fire scene for 24 hours. That afternoon he was working on a highway survey team, and when he returned to Hanover he found that all of the city's fire trucks were missing. His brother, Bob, was the dispatcher on duty and Dan was told to collect his equipment and head to Lebanon.

Perrier has vivid memories of his attempts to rescue merchandise from threatened stores, explosions in the paint shop, and a long, hard tour of duty. But his most vivid memory is what happened to the graduation photos of Lebanon's great class of 1964: They were all lost when the McNeil Pharmacy burned down.

The Valley News increased its circulation for the next day and was sold out throughout the Upper Valley. Its media coverage was built around Larry McDonald's dramatic photographs and a three-header headline proclaiming losses of $3 million, the equivalent of $30 million today.

Not everyone who heard about the fire was nearby. Erling “Sonny” Heistad of Lebanon was a foreman for Perini Construction’s Rt. I-93 in the Plymouth, NH area. One of his truck drivers stopped and said Lebanon was burning – he had heard it on the radio in his taxi. Several other drivers from the Lebanon area lined up and turned off their vehicles and Heistad let them stand to listen to the radio reports.

The entire New Hampshire National Guard in convoy passed through Lebanon on the road. 4 around noon June 19, bound for annual field training at Camp Drum, New York. The automobile march included jeeps, trucks and five battalions of 155mm and 8-inch howitzers. The column reached Keene Valley, New York, in the evening, set up bivouac, and refueled with vehicles. A transistor radio tuned to a station somewhere in the Adirondacks reported that downtown Lebanon had been destroyed by fire.

No cell phones in those days – when the guards finally reached Camp Drum the next afternoon, someone found a payphone and called home with the news, which quickly spread through the ranks . Half-jokingly, it was hoped that the troops who had just passed through Lebanon would not be blamed for starting the Great Fire of Lebanon.

How to rebuild Lebanon's fire-ravaged city center would lead to political wrangling for years. Eventually, a design developed by Hanover city planning consultant Hans Klunder was adopted, creating a shopping center where the old Hanover Street had been, rerouting Rt. 120 traffic and leading to the development of new commercial structures and vast parking lots – a completely different atmosphere for Lebanon.

Steve Taylor, occasional Valley News contributor, resides in Meriden. He was in the National Guard convoy crossing Lebanon minutes before the fire broke out.