The following was published in the Stamford Advocate on March 24, 1913.
$25,000 Fire Damage in Fessenden Block
Blaze in Cellar Ruins Big Stocks of Merchandise on Easter Day
BEEHLER’S LOSS, $12,000; H.NEWSTAD’s, $6,000
JK Lawrence suffers $2500 loss; Royce and Judd, $200, and building damaged $3500 — tenants driven from building like clouds of smoke while firemen fought hard to confined the blaze to lower part of the building.
With hundreds of people looking on, many of them wearing goods which had escaped the fire only by a matter of hours, the Stanford fire department engaged, yesterday afternoon, in the hardest battle it has had in years. After two hours and 15 minutes of desperate work, the firemen conquered a stubborn and disastrous cellar fire which broke out in FT Beehler’s haberdashery in the Fessenden Block and spread through holes in the brick partition walls to Hyman Newsted’s millinery store on the south, and, in spots, to JK Lawrence’s drugstore on the north.
We purchased the above postcard from eBay for $24.99 on March 15, 2015. It is one of the oldest known action photographs of Stamford Firefighters in action, Notes on the back of the picture indicated that the photo was taken in 1910 on Easter Sunday. But according to our records, there were no fires on Easter Sunday of that year. However, we did find that on Easter Sunday, March 23, 1913, the Beehler Hat Store in the Fessenden block on Atlantic St., opposite Bell St. caught fire. The recorded loss was $14,776. If you zoom in on the photo, the sign above the doorway appears to read “Men’s Wear”. This would be consistent for a “Hat Shop”. The man standing in the foreground wearing the heavy overcoat appears to be then Chief Harry Parker.
The above picture is another photo of the same fire. This picture was found in the Stamford Historical Society.
