Fire in the Village of Gilboa: 1890

THE 1890 FIRE

In the late 19th century, Gilboa village was a large flourishing business hub with considerable industry, retail, crafts, lodging, and professionals. Area people headed there for shopping, entertainment, visiting and services.

In the early Sunday morning hours of May 4, 1890, a catastrophic fire engulfed the entire business section of Gilboa village — 25 buildings, other outbuildings and their contents were destroyed. Surprisingly, no lives were lost and only minor injuries reported.

The business section on lower Main Street included the Gilboa House, the Methodist Episcopal church, Masonic Hall, town, law, and medical offices, restaurants, hardware, multiple dry goods and grocery stores, harness shops, tin shops, blacksmiths, a barber shop, billiard parlor, post office, furniture shop, undertaker, dwelling houses and the print shop for the Gilboa Monitor.

Discovered by Lute Hildreth, the fire started either in A.G. Baldwin’s 50-year-old Arcade building across the street from the Gilboa House livery or the Snyder blacksmith shop north of it and quickly spread south down and across Main Street. With no fire department, villagers awakened by the old church bell desperately fought the blaze with a bucket brigade — a line of people passing buckets of water toward the fire. But it was a trickle against the raging inferno. The fire was headed toward the residential sections of town when Dr. J.T. Benham suggested that they use dynamite to stop it. They put dynamite under the Reed store,

M.D. Spencer’s shop and home, and Ira Travell’s dwelling. Jane Jones’ home in between was also sacrificed bringing the fire to a stop at the dwellings of Alonzo Stryker on the east side of Main and Travell’s on the west.

Nearly two thousand people visited a village in ashes in the days following the fire. After their initial shock, villagers of Gilboa and their nearby town neighbors stepped right in to rebuild – bigger, safer, and better. Rebuilding took many years since most buildings were underinsured.

Despite their devastation, narrow escape and escalating insurance rates, it was 12 years before a major upgrade to the village public water system was approved and for town leadership to formally propose a vote (women were excluded) to purchase firefighting equipment and impose hydrant rents for leasing public water within the new fire district.