WELLS RIVER — Janis Moore was sitting in her car parked near the Little Rivers Health Care clinic on Main Street on Monday when she “smelled something like a cigar” and heard the man who was watering the clinic’s garden yell to her: “My God, can you see this?”
“All of a sudden, like a wave, smoke engulfed the front lawn of the clinic and was coming right at us,” Moore recalled on Tuesday. “You couldn’t see in front of you.”
It took only a moment for Moore to realized what was happening. Flames were shooting out of the bell tower of the historic Wells River schoolhouse at 74 Main St.. Set back from the other side of the road, the building is tucked between two other historic structures, a house built in 1792 and the congregational church built in 1839.
“The flames were very high and these are three of the oldest buildings in town, and I’m thinking they are going to go up like kindling. It was one of the scariest things I’ve ever witnessed,” Moore said Tuesday from the Newbury town office, where she works as a lister. (Wells River is a village of Newbury.)
Thanks to mild winds, a steady afternoon downpour and a massive response from Orange County and Grafton County area fire departments, the neighboring structures were unscorched. The flames were contained to the 148-year-old, two-story brick schoolhouse crowned with a bell tower.
However, the schoolhouse, built in 1874 in the style of the French Second Empire with pronounced Victorian flourishes, will require extensive rebuilding if it ever is to become habitable again, according to those who witnessed Monday’s blaze and inspected its aftermath.
“They were still cleaning things up at 7 this morning,” James Merriam, pastor at the Wells River Congregational Church next door, said Tuesday. He noted that some fire crews were still at the scene 20 hours after first being called at around noon Monday.
The ground floor received mostly water damage, but the roof collapsed and the upper floor will have to be entirely gutted, said Chad Roy, who was working on his own project a few doors away when the fire erupted.
The former schoolhouse, which closed in 1967, is currently owned by Lisa Stepancic, who purchased the property in 2017 for $169,000 and was most recently assessed at $174,000, according Newbury property records. Stepancic, who had been residing at the property, did not return messages for comment but told a Valley News photographer who visited the scene Tuesday afternoon that the fire started while she was using a heat gun to strip paint off the side of the building.
Roy, of St. Johnsbury, Vt., said he was inside his house a few doors away at 11 a.m. when his wife, who was outside, called for him to come out because something was happening. Roy walked onto the porch and saw a “cloud” of smoke engulfing their neighbor’s place. They hopped in their vehicle to rush down the street.
Roy said he arrived to find Stepancic “up in a lift trying to put the fire out.”
However, the fire extinguisher was not powerful enough to smother the fire, which was feeding off the dry timber in the eaves, according to Roy, who said he climbed into the lift himself and attempted to spray the flames with a garden hose to no avail.
At about 11:10 a.m. a call was placed to the fire department, which was on the scene within minutes, reported Roy.
In the meantime, Roy said, they rushed into the house to rescue Stepancic’s two dogs and six cats.
Also rescued from a backyard enclosure were six chickens, which Merriam said were brought out, all at once, under the arms of a firefighter.
“It was pretty dramatic,” Merriam said, who opened his “pet-friendly” church to Stepancic’s dogs and cats.
Stepancic and Dave Durkee, with whom she shares the house, spent the night on a pullout couch in Merriam’s office. (The chickens were housed overnight in a camper and are now back in their enclosure.)
His displaced next-door neighbors will “stay at the church as long as they need to, since finding anywhere that accepts pets is difficult,” Merriam said.
Merriam said he counted 50 to 60 firefighters and trucks and equipment from fire departments in Wells River, Newbury, Woodsville, Ryegate and North Haverhill at the scene.
Moore, the Newbury lister, called the fire “a sad day in town.”
“Everybody is really upset,” she said.
After being neglected for many years, Moore said, the old schoolhouse was finally getting attention as Stepancic and Durkee “were trying to do the right thing” by restoring it.
Shortly after Stepancic purchased the property, she gave the Wells River Action Program members a tour of the historic building.
“It was like going back in a time capsule,” Moore said, noting that some rooms still had old-fashioned chalkboards on the walls.
Hod Symes, who grew up in Wells River and attended grades 1 through 12 at the schoolhouse, said several grades were taught in the same classroom and only the seniors — there were nine seniors in his class when he graduated in 1951 — got their own classroom.
The entire number of students at the school for all 12 grades rarely rose above 40 students, Symes said, whose 2012 history of the village, Cross Roads: A History of Wells River, Vermont, makes him the go-to person for historical questions in town.
The senior classroom was directly under the bell tower and the bell rope dropped down into the room, enabling the seniors the privilege of ringing the bell twice a day: once when school began and a second time for the one-hour lunch break at noon.
Symes, 89, whose father and three sisters also attended the village school, recalled his studies included Latin. He went on to major in economics at Dartmouth College. Other classmates attended Cornell and the U.S. Naval Academy.
The Wells River schoolhouse may have been little, Symes said, but “it was an excellent education.”
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.
