CHARLESTON --The fire that swept through Blair Hall Wednesday was likely the largest blaze in Eastern Illinois University's history and one of the biggest in Charleston's history.
Paul Cottingham, a former battalion chief and arson investigator for the Charleston Fire and Rescue Department, said he knows of several small fires in rooms at residence halls during the last few decades.
Those small fires include one in 1994 at Carman Hall. In that case, a curling iron on a bed started a blaze that gutted the room and caused smoke damage throughout the floor. The only fire damage was in the room where the fire started.
In contrast, Cottingham said the fire at Blair Hall destroyed the roof of that 91-year-old academic and administrative building.
"This is probably the biggest structural and monetary damage," Cottingham said of Blair Hall.
Tom Watson, former chief of the fire and rescue department, said he also encountered small fires in residence halls, including one in the late 1960s or early 1970s in which someone had filled a room with newspaper and tissue and set it on fire as a joke.
Watson, who also researches the history of fire fighting in Charleston, said the fire at Blair Hall is the biggest he is aware of on campus.
Cottingham said off campus, a fire destroyed a fraternity house in the early or mid-1980s and injured a firefighter. He said a fire in the late 1970s at an apartment building killed three EIU students.
Watson said the largest fire off campus in recent years was the one in Feb. 13, 2000 that destroyed a four-story apartment building under construction at Fourth Street and Buchanan Avenue.
Arson was the apparent cause of that blaze and the fire that destroyed the Charleston Community Church building in 1995.
"There have been a number of large fires in town going back in history," Watson said.
Fires claimed two buildings on Sixth Street near the square in May 2003, the Lincoln Land Visiting Nurse Association building on Loxa Road in the 1990s, the Charleston Community Church building on Monroe Avenue in 1995, buildings on Jackson Avenue uptown in the early 1970s, and the old Wilb Walker's supermarket complex at E Street and Lincoln Avenue in November 1967.
A fire during the frigid weather in the early 1960s destroyed a quarter-block of businesses at the southwest corner of the square. Water from the fire hoses formed thick sheets of ice around the scene as firefighters battled the blaze all night long.
The commercial building that was later built at that site along Jackson Avenue would eventually evolve into Charleston City Hall.
Those fires are not nearly as large in scale as one in March 1911 at a broom-corn warehouse on the north side of town.
Watson said that fire swept through broom-corn warehouses, as well as the nearby Big Four and Clover Leaf railroad depots. v "That was probably the biggest fire Charleston ever had," Watson said.
Related :
