Sixty years ago, on Dec. 13, 1964, the Unitarian Church at the top of Harvard Common burned to the ground in little more than an hour. It was the fourth church to have stood on this prominent spot at the top of the hill. Built in 1876 in the Queen Anne style popular at the time, the two-story wooden church had an asymmetrical facade, ornate external trim, and a large tower with a spire. It contrasted sharply with the 1840 church it had replaced and with its 1967 colonial revival successor, which looks very much like the 1840 church. During the two and a half years of the building of the new church, parishioners attended services at the Fellowship Building across Elm Street and down the lane from the present church.
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Residents witness the fire’s devastation. (Photos courtesy of Harvard Historical Society)
Ruthann Bakun, a board member of the Historical Society who grew up in Harvard and now lives in Still River, has been doing research on the 1964 fire. She was 14 at the time, and on the day of the fire, she was out of town visiting her grandparents at a family gathering. But her brother, Dick Powderly, 21 at the time, was home for the weekend and was one of the volunteer firemen fighting the blaze. He often talked about that day. Rather than being traumatized in any way, Bakun said the fire made Dick only more eager to continue fighting fires.
A mild, quiet day
As part of her research, Bakun sent a Facebook posting to the Harvard group, Beyond the Stone Walls, asking for people’s input from the day of the fire. The following is her compilation of those responses, along with details from an earlier posting by the late Fire Chief Peter Warren, and her findings in the society archives.
“It was a relatively mild day for December, with temperatures in the 40s and 50s and only a slight wind. The center churches had completed their Sunday services. The new Unitarian Church minister, Rev. Carl Bretz, had given his second sermon to his new congregation. The church was emptied by 1:15 p.m.
“Many people reported that they were busy with usual Sunday activities around the center. Firemen gathered at the firehouse, shooting pool or watching a football game. Young men in their “muscle” cars hung around the front of the General Store. The Brown family on Old Littleton Road was hosting a Girl Scout barbecue.
“The quiet was sharply interrupted when the fire alarm sounded at 2:48 p.m. An anonymous call had alerted the police and fire dispatcher that there was a fire at the Unitarian Church. In less than 15 minutes the structure was engulfed in flames.
“Six fire companies responded with more than 14 pieces of equipment and as many as 84 firefighters. Bill Mead, the local tree surgeon, brought his bucket truck so that the firefighters could attack the fire from above. Jack Burdick, the fire chief, sent volunteer firefighters Dick Powderly, Bill Hazel, Ray Anderson, and Al Nogler into the church to try to retrieve a Paul Revere pewter communion set—to no avail. Volunteers safely removed town records from the adjacent Town Hall, in case the fire should spread to that building. Tank trucks from nearby dairies came with water. Townspeople responded in droves, taking photographs and doing whatever they could.
“By 4 p.m. the church was declared a total loss.”
A member of the Brown family sent Bakun their parents’ 8 mm film of the fire, which she has had digitized. It will be on the Historical Society’s website. The film shows the fire making its way from the east side of the church to the steeple on the west, the last of the structure to fall. From the vantage point of the camera it’s not possible to see any trucks or firemen, and one senses the helplessness people must have felt as they watched the inferno tear through the building.
Fairbank Street resident Pat Hatch was a young mother living on Oak Hill Road at the time. In an email, she described how she was in the yard with her kids when they heard the town fire whistle. She and a couple of other mothers took their children’s hands and started walking up the street. “It didn’t take many steps before we saw lots of smoke and fire. We stopped at the inn [11 Fairbank] and stood on that sidewalk. It was very emotional; I had been married in that church. I remember standing there watching the steeple fall. It all happened so quickly.”
The 1876 Victorian-style church at the top of the Common.
There was speculation about the fire’s cause—candles left burning or kids in the basement playing with matches. But according to the official report from the State Fire Marshal, the fire was the result of a boiler malfunction. This seems sadly ironic because it was a point of pride that the church, in addition to being the first of the churches to have flush toilets, was the first to have heat.
A lack of water
As with earlier fires in town center, there was a lack of water to fight the blaze. In this case, drought conditions at the time made it difficult to pump water from nearby fire holes, and a lack of water pressure in the town center water system made fighting the fire almost impossible.
The town clock in the steeple, a gift from Warren Hapgood, was destroyed, but the 1860 steel bell from Sheffield, England, although damaged, was repaired and hung in the new church. That same bell had survived the burning of the previous Unitarian church in 1875. In a 1967 talk, “Five Churches,” town historian Elvira Scorgie said that in 1861 the parishioners, for no stated reason, had exchanged their Paul Revere bell, which first hung in the second meetinghouse, for the Sheffield steel bell. Had they not done so, Scorgie said, the bell would have been “a lump of metal.”
Another lucky thing was that prior to 1812, gunpowder had been stored in the roofs of meetinghouses. After the War of 1812, the Great and General Court decreed that all towns had to store gunpowder in a separate building. Harvard complied by building a brick powder house on the Common, west of the church. Had explosives been kept in the roof of the 1840 church, as they had been in the first and second meetinghouses that stood on the same approximate spot, the 1875 fire might have destroyed many nearby buildings as well.
The destruction of the 1876 church was undoubtedly a loss to the whole town, but it allowed for a return to Harvard’s colonial roots. Although very up to date for the time, the Victorian style church may have come to look too eclectic and elaborate for its prominent setting. The present Unitarian Church, mirroring the stately simplicity of the Congregational Church at the foot of the hill, seems better suited to Harvard’s quintessentially New England Common.
