It had not rained in Canaan for days leading up to June 3, 1923. So, when a barn on School Street went up in flames that windy Saturday morning, it took only two hours for the fire to leap from building to building until it had consumed most of the village center, and warped the railroad for miles in both directions.
Some 48 buildings had been reduced to piles of rubble and ash. Two people, a father and son, lost their lives; another man’s burns left him permanently disabled.
“It was a terrible, terrible catastrophe,” said Donna Zani-Dunkerton, the town historian. “It was all gone. If you stand at the blinking light now and look in either direction, everything there was completely leveled.”
The town may have been “practically wiped out,” as one upstate New York newspaper reported at the time, but the spirit of the townspeople remained unbowed. Builders rushed to clear away the mangled metal and melted glass, so that the town’s resurrection could begin.
Much of the wreckage ended up in the nearby Indian River, at a dumping site under a bridge on what’s now Route 4, across from Williams Field. Some of it was carried away by the river. The rest of it settled into the soggy bank. Now, thanks to the erosive forces of water and time, the charred, melted remains of the great Canaan fire have been emerging from the mud and silt. To unearth them is also to unearth the story of a town’s determination to rise up from its ashes stronger than it was before.
Over the years, Gary Hamel, the historian of the neighboring town of Orange, has clambered down to the riverbank and exhumed bits and pieces of Canaan’s past: a soldier’s belt buckle; skeletons of tobacco pipes; the eerily decapitated head of a porcelain doll; and the melted, twisted remains of glass inkwells, apothecary vials and beverage bottles.
He’s donated some of these finds to the Canaan Historical Museum, where Zani-Dunkerton keeps them in a box on a shelf. To her, they illustrate the sheer magnitude of the fire’s damage to the town.
“They’re not of any value. But to me they’re interesting,” she said. “Just the fact of knowing that they were in somebody’s home or business or whatever, that in two hours was completely leveled. It was a horrible, horrible thing.”
But these items’ long entombment in the riverbank also speaks to the way the town responded to a catastrophe that shook it to its core.
Within a year of the fire, new buildings lined new streets, replacing a wasteland of ash and brick. Though Zani-Dunkerton expressed skepticism that business had bounced back the way many people claimed it did, she acknowledged that it was a transformation, and one that the town had made great efforts to implement as soon as possible.
At the time, local newspapers characterized this response as a testament to the resilience of the town.
“Canaan has been crushed but not conquered,” reported The Canaan Reporter six days after the fire.
The story went on to list each building that had been destroyed — businesses, churches, homes — before praising the townspeople for their toughness: “There has been no whining. Even those most terribly hit have kept their composure and maintained a brave front and with hearts as stout as possible face the future and its promise of recovery from the devastation.”
And, from an editorial in that issue: “There is no use dwelling on the details of the disaster or in wasting time over vain regrets. The thing is done and the less said about it the better. The time is with us now for a long look ahead, for clear vision and a sound scheme for replacement and growth … to grasp the opportunity for a finer town, and a more sightly community.”
And so, in the name of sweeping this trauma out of sight and mind, into the river the rubble went. But despite the town’s desire to move on from the fire, its leftovers are literally embedded in Canaan’s landscape, preserved in a cross-section of mud and earth that is still visible today.
“You used to be able to see a bigger section of archeological strata along the riverbank,” Hamel said. “You could see evidence of fire in layers of charcoal, ash, metal, pieces of mica, all sorts of melted, rusted things.”
Last spring, Hamel noticed that a large portion of the riverbank seemed to have washed away. As a result, many of the objects that had been lodged in the bank have come loose, and found a new home in the river.
This makes the river an archeological jackpot, if not a safe one: It’s awash with chunks of broken glass, the edges of which have not yet been tumbled smooth, and the battered remains of teacups, flatware, some colorfully decorated pottery, charred brick and unidentifiable bits of metal. With some careful searching and a bit of luck, I was able to unearth a few melted bottlenecks in various states of degradation.
And so it seems that burying the past is not the same as escaping it.
Canaan’s pulling-itself-up-by-the-bootstraps narrative makes sense to Zani-Dunkerton; people needed to get through the crisis, after all. But she thinks it’s important to remember the fire for what it was: a bruise on the town’s history, and one that she thinks the town never fully recovered from.
“(The fire) certainly has its place in history because it destroyed the village, and a lot of people were financially ruined,” she said. “A lot of people would say Canaan came back and was a better town and so on, but as I said, a lot of people were financially ruined. It was horrible.”
And no, she said, she doesn’t think Canaan ended up becoming a better town. The businesses that burned in the fire, from a shop selling overalls to the Hotel Barnard, never returned. People had to go to Lebanon and Hanover to find work, which Zani-Dunkerton said didn’t help Canaan’s economy.
“It’s like at the mall, with the bigger places taking business away from the small ones,” she said.
To Zani-Dunkerton’s knowledge, there are no living witnesses to the fire today. Daniel Fleetham Sr., who was 11 years old at the time of the fire, passed away last fall at the age of 104. But his son, Daniel Fleetham Jr., remembers hearing his father’s stories about the blaze.
“His parents, and the other parents on Canaan Street, wouldn’t let the kids go down beyond the pinnacle,” Fleetham said, referring to the vista that overlooks the town center from the north. “So he and some of the other kids stood on the pinnacle and watched the whole town burn down, or what appeared to be the whole town.”
He wasn’t scared, though — he was just amazed.
“For an 11-year-old, it was impressive,” Fleetham said. “There wasn’t much else going on for a kid in Canaan, so it was a big excitement for him.”
Less exciting at the time, perhaps, were the odds and ends the fire didn’t claim. But those blackened bricks and twisted bottles, like the town that cast them off, didn’t go down without a fight. In these objects’ journey from fiery blaze to watery grave, they’re some of the only surviving artifacts of the destruction Canaan survived, too.
EmmaJean Holley can be reached at eholley@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.