Residents Remember Massive Mo. Fire 50 Years Later

The hill pushes up Spring Street, just like it did 50 years ago. This contour sweeps the southerly winds of spring toward the crest, where, of all things, an old fire engine has planted itself.

Frances Miller smiles at this.

Her husband, Robert, would become a rural firefighter and a seller of fireworks. But in 1962, he had brought his young family to DeKalb, Mo., in southern Buchanan County, where he taught math to seventh- and eighth-graders.

The end of that first school year approached, and Mrs. Miller watched their three children at the house on Spring Street. The noon hour came, and she heard a stir down the hill. A neighbor's voice came through the windows.

"Fire! Fire!"

Over the next two and a half hours, stoked by a 35 mph wind and incapable of being stopped because the village had no water system, the blaze destroyed 12 buildings and displaced 10 percent of DeKalb's residents.

The fire, a half-century ago today, only stalled when it met the two-story brick building that housed the post office at the top of the hill.

Mrs. Miller, who lives in the house her husband rebuilt on the site after that day, still marvels at the speed with which it all happened.

"It was so bad you just couldn't think," she says. "I was here by myself with the babies."

People agree the fire started in a shed at the bottom of the hill. The first house it ignited belonged to Mick and Frances Strong.

Kay Wheeler, the Strong couple's daughter, had a 1-year-old son taking a nap in the house. They cleared out to a neighbor's home and even managed to drag some furniture into a back lot.

But that served as no comfort to Mrs. Strong, who worked at Whitaker Cable in St. Joseph and got word only of a blaze in her hometown.

"She had her foreman drive her down here and she got out and ran because she knew the baby and her husband were down there in that house," Mrs. Wheeler remembers.

Cheryl Berry of St. Joseph, Mrs. Miller's daughter and age 6 at the time, thinks back on the initial fascination of the fire down the street and the dawning realization of spreading destruction. The burning embers passed from one house to the next.

"There was nothing to stop it," she says. "What do you do? You just get yourself out."

Mrs. Miller took her children, Cheryl, 4-year-old Debbie and infant Steve, to a house across the street. As the fire got closer, the kids were taken to the village's park.

News accounts of the day talked of efforts to save household belongings as the fire raced along. Male students at the school were released to join the effort.

Vacant lots took on a rummage sale bearing, strewn with clothing and sofas, even stoves, removed from uphill homes. In some cases, airborne sparks caught mattresses on fire, though seemingly on safe ground.

Mrs. John West, the News-Press reported, had been out helping neighbors clear their homes when she realized her house would be the next to go. She grabbed armloads of hanging clothes and put them in a truck, but embers got to the garments and dotted them with holes.

Edith Frakes, an 82-year-old widow, had been preparing her lunch in anticipation of neighbor women coming over to help wallpaper a room. When the fire claimed her home, she lost all her possessions except the wallpaper.

Fire departments responded from St. Joseph, Dearborn, Edgerton, Platte City and Weston. Eventually, the firefighters laid out hoses that pumped water from a farm pond 1,100 feet away.

By afternoon's end, eight houses and four commercial buildings had been burned beyond use. The blessing was that no one died. Thirty residents in the town of 300 had to find new living arrangements. A damaged phone cable knocked out service to the village. The county highway department sent a bulldozer to knock down remaining chimneys, hastening a cleanup.

"Everybody looked after you and helped," Mrs. Miller recalls.

The Millers had lived in their house less than a year, but they set about rebuilding. They first finished the basement, then lived there while the upstairs took shape. The rest of the neighbors cleared their own property and started anew.

"I've lived here all my life," Mrs. Wheeler says. "I'm not going to leave."

In the years that followed, the town invested in a public water system. Future fires would face a line of defense. And the outhouses of DeKalb became history.

"You remember those things," Ms. Berry laughs.

If scars exist of the fire of April 26, 1962, they reside in memory. The people of DeKalb recovered and went on with life.

Mrs. Miller, a young mother who got her children to safety, watched an uncontrolled fire consume a good portion of her small town. She hopes never to see such a thing again. "The first and last," she says.

Copyright 2012 - St. Joseph News-Press, Mo.

McClatchy-Tribune News Service