April Feature Story: Fire and Ice: The Canterbury Center fire
The Canterbury Center Fire
On one frigid night, flames destroyed much of Canterbury Center
By David Tirrell-Wysocki
Based on the memories of Catherine Dickson in “As I’ve Heard Tell,” “Staying Small in a Century of Growth” by Kathryn Grover and a public presentation by historian Mark Stevens in 2022. Photos courtesy of Mark Stevens, Canterbury Historical Society.
The night of April 6-7, 1943, was frigid in Canterbury; zero degrees with a howling wind.
It was so cold that there was a roaring fire in the Union Hall wood-burning stove during a Grange meeting and an event afterward. A few hours after everyone left, there was a roaring fire throughout the building. A few hours after that, the Hall and much of Canterbury Center were gone.
Sometime around 1:30 in the morning, the fire started on the second floor of the Union Hall, in the corner of the building where the wood-burning stove was located. (The building was situated roughly between the current church and the current Town Hall locations.) Some believe there was a problem with the stove or chimney. Others pointed to wiring. No official cause was determined. The Grange minutes from that evening note that after a formal meeting, they had a supper. Others remember it as a traditional farewell party for a young man from Canterbury going away to war.
After the gathering, four people remained in the building: Bertha and Gerald Giles and their sons, Lenny and Duke. They were asleep in their apartment on the ground floor — the same floor that housed the Post Office and a store that Gerald Giles ran. The Giles family awoke as flames spread above them from the second-floor meeting area to the third floor.
Gerald, blocked from his phone by the flames, sent his sons to nearby homes to sound the alarm. At that time, there were strategically placed “Red Phones” around town where residents could report a fire. The Guertin/Dickson homes on Old Tilton Road near the Center had Red Phones. Duke woke Catherine Dickson, whose home was just beyond the Center’s one-room schoolhouse.
“Looking out the window, I could see flames coming from the chimney and from the wall of the store around the chimney,” Catherine wrote.
The wind-blown flames spread quickly as Catherine began a frantic and very frustrating series of phone calls. Because Canterbury had no fire department, she tried calling fire departments in Concord and Boscawen, only to be told that they could not respond without authorization from a Canterbury selectman.
She got no answer when calling the selectmen’s homes, concluding that they couldn’t hear their phones because of the wind and because, to conserve heat, most people closed off downstairs rooms – where their phones were located – when they went to bed.
As flames jumped to the Congregational Church, she dialed the operator and explained the dire situation. With the operator’s help, they persuaded Concord and Boscawen firefighters to respond. Then, with her own home’s windows hot to touch, she hurriedly made more calls to alert other residents before the phone lines in the Center burned.
At the same time, as Canterbury historian Mark Stevens recounted, others spread the alarm in person.
“If you knew somebody was home,” Mark said, “you drove there, blew the horn, flashed the lights and they come out and say, ‘What’s the matter?’ And you say, ‘There’s a fire at such and such.’”
Rousted townspeople converged on the Center.
Lenny Giles told Mark that neighbors formed a kind of reverse bucket brigade, helping his parents recover items from the store.
“He remembers grabbing canned goods off the shelves and throwing them out the window and grabbing whatever personal effects they could and bringing them out the window or passing them out the door until it got too dangerous and then they bailed out,” Mark said.
There was no saving the Union Hall, a nearby private residence and the church. But, as the story goes, former town road agent Walter Hatch saved Town Hall, which was being scorched by flames in the adjacent horse sheds. As Mark heard the story, Hatch either pushed the burning sheds away from Town Hall with a snowplow or towed them away with a tractor and chain.
Firefighters from Boscawen, Concord, Franklin and Loudon were hampered by gale force winds, zero-degree temperatures and lack of water. A fire tanker from Boscawen was of no use because either the water in the tank or the pumping mechanism were frozen. Hoses used to draw water from Kimball Pond also froze, so firefighters pumped water from wells in the Center until they ran dry.
As multiple buildings burned, flaming embers carried by the wind skipped over some structures that still exist, including the one-room schoolhouse, the former Bed and Breakfast at the corner of Hackleboro and Baptist Roads, the former Elkins Library across Baptist Road and a home farther up the hill to the east. However, embers reached the home at the top of the hill, across from the current Canterbury Elementary School.
That’s where Albi Cass lived in a home he rented from Robert Frame. Albi was in the Center fighting the fire when someone told him his house, a quarter mile away, was engulfed. Flying embers also ignited flames that heavily damaged a house even farther away on Morrill Road.
Closer to the Center, sparks landed on Sabin Guertin’s shed on Old Tilton Road. He climbed a ladder and doused the flames with a bucket of water, then slipped off the ladder, becoming the only person injured in the conflagration.
The Concord Monitor reported that firefighters and residents fought the flames for seven hours, with daybreak in the Center presenting “a sorry picture.” Shell-shocked residents gazed at ice-covered rubble, smoke, cellar holes and a partially melted Revere Bell that would no longer call residents to worship. (A piece of the melted bell is in the Canterbury Historical Society collection).
The fire destroyed five buildings, including the Congregational Church; the Union Hall with its apartment, Post Office, store and meeting place; the horse sheds; a home in the Center; and the Cass home on Baptist Road. Others were damaged. Embers also started fires in the woods.
The town immediately began its recovery. With smoke still escaping the rubble, Giles had a temporary store and Post Office running within hours on April 7 in the Vestry building, which stood where the flagpole is today. Later the operation moved to where the Canterbury Country Store is today.
A joint town-state committee developed an artist’s rendering of a new Center in time for the January 1944 Town Report.
As part of the revitalization, Town Hall was moved in 1947 from its location several feet from today’s Canterbury Country Store to its current location. A new church was built in approximately the same location as the one that burned. It was completed in 1948 and dedicated the following year.
Soon after the fire, the town established a volunteer fire department, (the first members were listed in the 1944 town report) but, with many able-bodied men still at war, it was another year or two before it filled out its roster. In 1945, the town bought a used fire engine from the State Hospital in Concord, which was featured on the cover of that year’s town report.
At the Statehouse, Gov. Robert Blood noticed how townspeople had come together to fight the fire, help those who suffered losses and joined planning for and rebuilding the Center. He visited Canterbury on Old Home Day, four months after the fire, with words of praise.
“The recent fire that swept the Center was unable, like war or aught else, to destroy the things that have made, and still make this village a type and symbol of New England’s perennial strength,” he said.