Looking Back

To back up a little, since the town was started around 1807, it had, like all small towns of that period, fires that destroyed large sections of their business district.

Using old newspaper accounts, diaries and first hand interviews, the historical society has been able to document most of those fires.

In 1874, the First Presbyterian Church burned. The basement of the church was being used as a temporary courthouse until the county could afford to build one, having just been created as a separate political unity in 1870.

That same year the town’s largest hotel burned.

In 1878, the Hartsville Male and Female Academy burned. This was the town’s only school.

A deadly fire in 1887 burned the large Day and Allen Livery Stable, killing 25 horses that were caught in their stalls in the building.

By 1900, the county had a large brick courthouse. It was two stories and stood about where Volunteer Pool and Hardware is today. Both sides of Main Street held businesses and the town had a large hotel.

In that same year, a fire started in the upstairs of Byrn’s & Son General Merchandise Store, and spread to the first building of the Bank of Hartsville to W. J. Hale & Sons Dry Goods and then to our courthouse.

The entire north side of the street burned to the ground. Most of the buildings had little or no insurance.

To rebuild the courthouse would take $10,000. It was insured for only $4,000, having only recently dropped a more expensive policy that was for $8,000 in an effort to save money.

The street and courthouse were quickly rebuilt, but a few years later, in 1902, the other side of Main Street decided to get in on the action, and it too burned.

In this fire, the Dalton Hotel and the Allen Hotel both burned, as did the dry goods store of J. P. Collinsworth, the Rankin and Story notions store, the J. C. Allen grocery, the A. F. Stanford furniture business, a grocery store owned by Ed Key and one house.

Like the fire on the north side of the street, the flames had spread from one building to the adjacent one, and so on down the street.

But, the biggest fire was yet to come.

On August 28, 1904, a fire broke out in the Hall and Robertson Livery Stable.

It quickly got out of hand as the stable was a large wooden structure full of hay and very combustible.

It spread down the street, rapidly taking building after building, including the newly rebuilt courthouse. Then, as the smoke engulfed the downtown, it leaped across the street!

Before it was finished with its deadly rampage, both the north and south sides of Main Street were burnt to the ground. The fire had even taken the few business buildings on River Street and several homes.

It was after this devastating fire that the courthouse was moved from its original location to a block all to itself, the site of a hotel that had been rebuilt after the fire of 1902, but was destroyed again in this fire.

The fire lasted three hours and the smoke could be seen in Gallatin and Carthage!

There would be more fires before 1924, but measures were being taken to prevent their spread.

By placing the courthouse on a large lot to itself, it was better protected. An ordinance limiting downtown buildings to being of brick construction rather than wood, also kept fires from spreading so easily.

It would still be years away before the town had a water system and could place fire hydrants on each block, but the new volunteer organization was a step in the right direction.

The first fire engine only carried a little over 100 gallons of water, and a larger fire engine was purchased a few years later. After World War II, bigger and better fire engines were available, and today our Volunteer Fire Department is equipped with the most modern and efficient fire engines available.