Jim Bradshaw: When every small town could remember a catastrophic fire

Practically any town built when most structures were made of wood and crowded close together has suffered a disastrous fire.
Water supplies were often poor or non-existent, and volunteer firemen were usually ill-trained and ill-equipped.
All of those things may have contributed to the big fire in Mamou in November 1944, but there may have been another factor: Many of the young firefighters who usually made up the small town’s volunteer force were off at a bigger firefight called World War II.
Newspapers are filled with accounts of “disastrous conflagrations” sweeping through small towns in south Louisiana.
In January 1900, Abbeville became “Food for the Flames,” according to the headline in the Meridional, which reported, “a few buckets of water at the start would [have sufficed] to put the fire out,” but by the time a bucket brigade was organized, Dr. Mark Theriot’s office at the corner of State and Peace streets had become “a seething mass of flames.” Nearly all of the businesses on State Street were destroyed by that blaze.
Just a month later, in February 1900, the main college building at Grand Coteau burned and its “magnificent library comprising over 5,000 volumes” was destroyed.
A cold, brisk November wind drove the fire that consumed much of Jennings in 1901. Oil had been discovered at the Evangeline Field just two months before and Jennings was in the midst of a building boom. Shacks made of rough pine boards were going up everywhere and made fine fodder for the flames.
The Jennings Record reported on Nov. 4, “Last night’s conflagration, in which was involved a large portion of the business district … was the most disastrous that has visited this section since its establishment.”
As with the Abbeville fire, a Jennings resident reported, “I could have put out the fire and saved the town with a few buckets of water” when he first saw it. But the town had no water system at all and the bucket brigade from the town well provided too little, too late to fight the spreading blaze.
After the fire that struck Washington in 1902, Raymond Breaux, editor of the St. Landry Clarion reported, “Every building in the town was not burned, but the business portion, the heart and life of the town, is now represented by heaps of ashes and smoldering coals.”
In Welsh, the “Great Fire” broke out early in the morning of Sunday, March 27, 1910.
Forty buildings were ultimately consumed. The fire began in the Signal Hotel on Welsh’s main street, which ran parallel to the railroad.
The Lake Charles American Press reported, “although the morning was still and there was no wind, the flames leaped across the 250-foot street and railroad right of way as though the air itself was inflammable gas. … Houses in all parts of town, far from the doomed section, caught fire. Firefighters and the citizenry “fought for hours to save all from destruction.”
Just weeks later, one of the most memorable and disastrous fires in south Louisiana erupted in Lake Charles.
he American Press reported on April 24, “Heaps of charred boards, scorched frameworks, tottering chimneys and walls and tangled wires, illumined by flickering flames marked the [area where] 109 buildings occupying seven city blocks [were destroyed by] an uncontrollable fire [that] swept south and east for three hours until it was finally checked partly by lack of material [to burn] and partly by the superhuman exertion by the fire department and volunteer aids.”
The Catholic church, courthouse, and town hall were among the buildings burned, along with the vital records they housed.
Nobody knew just what started the fire that consumed the heart of the business district in Mamou on Nov. 6, 1944.
The Lafayette Advertiser reported that buildings razed in the fire included “the post office, three cafes, an Auto-Lec store, barber shop, saloon, hardware store, and one other structure which local firemen could not identify as it was a heap of ruins when they reached the scene.”
The Post-Signal in Crowley added that “flames were spreading into other … blocks when Opelousas firemen arrived and … working with Eunice and Ville Platte companies, were able to save what remained of the town’s business district.”
The United Press reported that contents of the burned buildings were also “a complete loss.” Some mail was destroyed, but postal records were kept in a fireproof safe.
That’s about all that was reported about the loss to that little town in the immediate aftermath of the fire.
The news pages were dominated by two other events: The American attempt to retake Leyte in the Pacific war was meeting “savage” resistance and Nov. 6, 1944 was a historic election day. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was swept into his fourth term in the White House.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, "Cajuns and Other Characters," is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.