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Lake County History: Three fires in Lakeport
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Wood frame buildings, wooden stairs, and wooden awnings were ingredients in a recipe for disaster when “the dread demon of fire” visited Lakeport three times between July 1924 and April 1926.
Some of Lakeport’s buildings stood three stories tall, but available ladders only reached two stories, forcing people to escape down ropes from the Monroe Apartments. News accounts do not mention fire escapes.
Despite a lack of fully functional equipment, Lakeport’s fire department, with help from other towns, fought valiantly to save the downtown area. No one died in the fires and no one sustained major injuries, but some people barely escaped in time.
Businesses, offices, apartment buildings and homes all went up in flames with damages totaling about $183,000. Some business owners who lived adjacent to their businesses lost both their homes and their businesses.
H.P. McQueen’s Blue Goose Grill and A.W. Chapman’s grocery store were among those businesses burned out in more than one of these fires.
On July 21, 1924, around 5:30 p.m. a fire started near First and Main streets. By the time firefighters controlled the blaze an hour later, five businesses, housed in three buildings were gone, and others had sustained damage. A.M. Akins’ hardware store, Mrs. A. Marsh’s hotel building, John Behr’s building, W. A. Chapman’s grocery store, Leflor and Saunders’ restaurant and hotel business, Piner’s auto top business and Fred Michaels’ cabinet and machine shop all burned in the fire. Damages totaled about $38,100.
Firefighters remained at the scene through the night, alert for flare-ups. Volunteers from Kelseyville and Upper Lake came to support Lakeport, just as Lakeport volunteers had assisted at Upper Lake’s devastating fire only three months earlier.
A vaudeville troupe, in town to perform, assisted in saving the Orpheum Theatre.
Two men fighting the fire on the roof of Akins’ hardware store were stranded on top of a brick wall when the roof collapsed. They managed to escape onto the roof of the adjacent Whitton Building and make their way to safety.
Following the 1924 fire, the town board set up a fire district, bounded by Clear Lake, Armstrong, Forbes and Sixth streets, within in which no more frame buildings would be permitted.
The requirements did not remove existing frame buildings within the boundaries, leaving Lakeport still vulnerable to fire.
The town didn’t have long to wait for the next conflagration.
A midday fire roared through buildings between Third and Fourth streets along Main Street’s east side on June 26, 1925. Faulty wiring was suspected as the cause of the fire that broke out shortly before noon in the Lakeman building.
The fire destroyed the three-story Piner Apartment building (formerly the May building) which also housed three stores; Jacob Lakeman’s building and his residence behind and Dr. Stipp’s home. Damage to these wood-frame buildings totaled about $45,300.
Volunteers helped to move most of Dr. Stipp’s possessions to safety from his doomed residence, but were unable to save his Oldsmobile.
Firefighters abandoned Stipp’s house when they realized that they could not save it and that the fire was threatening the west side of the street. They held the fire to the east side of Main Street, but the heat broke windows in buildings on the west side as far north as Anderson & Relfe’s Chevrolet dealership between Fourth and Fifth.
Main Street’s west side had been spared, temporarily. Employees at the Lake County Bee discovered a breaking news story on their doorstep about 11 p.m. on April 20, 1926, when they noticed a fire in the rear of the nearby Monroe Apartments.
By the time firefighters had controlled the blaze a few hours later five buildings had burned and damages had reached about $100,000.
The three-story Monroe Building, formerly the Lakeview Hotel, housed four businesses on the first floor, with apartments on the second and third floors.
Flames pouring up the stairs of the Monroe Building, which apparently had no fire escapes, nearly trapped several residents and guests.
Pendy Burriss barely escaped and then returned to rescue Mrs. Monroe who was unable to get out of the building on her own
Members of the Dixie Jubilee Quartet, settling in for the night at the Monroe Apartments after a performance, were roused by the alarms. With little time to spare, they threw their suitcases out the windows to safety, and then waited while firefighters tried to get a ladder to them. Some of the troupe escaped down ropes when ladders proved to be too short to reach them on the third floor.
The fire burned north along Main Street to the south wall of the Masonic hall and west along Third Street, where it damaged the Lake County Bee office.
Both the Lake County Bee and the Clear Lake Press suffered damage but were able to publish their papers. Volunteers had moved paper and equipment out of the Bee plant to safety and brought it back when the danger had passed. By 4 a.m. the Bee was back in operation and published the issue that the fire had interrupted.
With the Press office destroyed, the employees published it with help from the Lake County Record in Upper Lake and the Bee in Lakeport.
Two bodies awaiting funerals at Russell’s undertaking establishment were taken to a safer location before flames destroyed the business.
Other businesses lost in the 1926 fire were The Toggery, Embree & Charlton’s barber shop, Winstead’s Café, Curry’s Furniture, Dr. F. H. Forshee’s optometry office, California Telephone & Light and the Blue Goose Grill.
Within a week of the fire, business owners had found new locations and the property owners were making plans to replace the destroyed buildings.
The Clear Lake Press linotype had been hauled to San Francisco for repairs, but the Lakeport Women’s Civic Club, which owned the building, decided not to rebuild. The Clear Lake Press went out of business in July 1926.
After the 1926 fire the Lakeport Fire Department declared wooden awnings to be a menace and requested that property owners remove them. The awnings were a fire hazard and many were rickety, not strong enough to support people who might be up there during fires.
Construction on new concrete buildings began in June. J. D. Monroe’s building had four store fronts facing Main Street and two on Third Street. This building now houses Watershed Books, The Video Game Shop, Your One Stop Party Shop, The Goldsmith jewelry shop and the Lake County Arts Council.
J. W. Curry, Sarah Monroe and Judge Morton Sayre also replaced their burned-out buildings with concrete structures that still stand along Main Street. Curry’s Furniture has remained in the same location since rebuilding.
Better firefighting equipment and improved building codes have done much to reduce the number of disastrous fires in Lakeport.
A grocery store on Third Street between Main and Park streets burned about 1990 and in 2012 the Lunas building at Main and Third Streets suffered major damage, but those fires did not spread to other buildings.
Note: Articles in the Lake County Bee and the Lake County Record are on microfilm in the collection of the Lake County Library.
Jan Cook has lived in Lake County for about 40 years. She works for the Lake County Library, is the editor of the Lake County Historical Society’s Pomo Bulletin and is a history correspondent for Lake County News. If you have questions or comments please contact Jan at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .