"Our worst nightmare"
Montpelier's leaders recall April 8 fire and make plans for new archaeology center
It’s been more than two months since a fire ravaged the archaeology office and adjacent lab at James Madison’s Montpelier. Director of Archaeology and Landscape Restoration Matthew Reeves grows somber when he recalls that terrible day.
In the midst of giving a talk for the Orange County African American Historical Society at the Orange train station, at around 5:30 p.m. on April 8, Reeves noticed that Bill Bichell, Montpelier’s director of facilities, was calling him repeatedly.
“After the fifth call, I just got this feeling, and I said, ‘Hey, everybody, let me take a break and ask Bill what's going on.’ And he said, ‘Matt, I've gotten several smoke alarms from your office. There’s a fire, and I've called the fire department.’
“Then, as soon as I hung up with Bill, Eola [Lewis Dance, Montpelier’s CEO and president] called me and she said—she was in tears, I could hear it in her voice—she said, ‘Matt, your office is on fire.’ And everybody that was on Zoom and in the meeting saw the blood just drain out of my face.”
Dance, in the midst of her first year as president and CEO of Montpelier, experienced a literal trial by fire. On that day, she had just stepped outside her office and was about to drive home.
“I heard a sound that caught my attention. And as I looked at the lab (a renovated trailer furnished for researchers and students and full of records and artifacts), I saw smoke and then, immediately, flames.” She called 911, and fire trucks arrived at 5:37 p.m. in a rapid response that she described with gratitude as “incredible.”
In those first horrifying moments, before the seasoned leader in her took over and began making emergency plans, Dance thought about Reeves and the extraordinary collection of artifacts and records amassed under his direction. “I could just picture 20 years of his career in that building, and it was very emotional. I knew that he was giving a talk at the train station and would not really understand the gravity of it until he saw it.
“Standing there and seeing how large those flames were, immediately I knew that it was going to be a very difficult fire. And indeed it was.”
A chaotic scene of smoke, spiking flames and numerous fire trucks greeted Reeves when he got back to his office and the lab next to it. The County of Orange Fire & EMS joined forces with the volunteer fire companies from Orange, Barboursville, Gordonsville, Lake of the Woods and Rapidan to put out the fire.
According to Whit Jacobs, chief of the Orange Volunteer Fire Company, there was fire blazing both inside and outside the archaeology office, which was housed in a wooden building constructed in 1902 during the DuPont family’s ownership of Montpelier. Starting from the outside, Jacobs wrote me, the crew’s initial plan of attack “was to knock the fire down, limit spread and get into the building to begin to fully extinguish the fire.”
Firefighters blasted water on the flames and then entered the building. “From the inside,” Jacobs said, “crews reported extremely tall ceilings and difficulty breaching the ceiling to fight fire that had extended to the attic space. With that information, we had a crew open up the attic from the exterior to get fast water into that space. Crews inside continued to work to open up the ceiling and were eventually successful. The crew inside utilized their access to completely extinguish the fire in the attic space.
“The documents and artifacts are irreplaceable”
I asked Chief Jacobs what was in his mind as he and all the other firefighters helped salvage an enormous quantity of important historic materials. “The documents and artifacts are irreplaceable,” he said. “We used the expert advice and guidance from Montpelier staff to assist us with salvage and overhaul operations. The intent was to make every effort to remove materials as quickly as possible to prevent damage—or further damage as a result of the continued salvage and overhaul operation within the building.”
Reeves told me that firefighters formed “a daisy chain” with him and other Montpelier staffers to move numerous artifacts and other materials to a safe area. Without the firefighters’ help, the head archaeologist said, “We would’ve lost the artifacts that were in the lab.”
Although I was unable to reach Orange County Fire Marshal Michael Throckmorton, Reeves said Throckmorton told him an electrical fire started the blaze. Reeves said there were “probably three generations of electricity” in his old office. “I don't think it would've taken very much in that building for the electricity to short out.”
On an intriguing note, he added that members of his staff had read that a solar eclipse can cause electrical issues, and he wondered whether there was any correlation, given that the fire at Montpelier took place not long after the April 8 eclipse concluded in Orange County.
On June 15, in the midst of Montpelier’s Juneteenth celebration, both Reeves and Dance took the time to talk with me about the fire and its aftermath. Between my conversations with them, I walked over to see the archaeology buildings. On the estate grounds at the edge of the woods, I stopped just short of the yellow “Fire Line Do Not Cross” tape stretched around the two structures.
Reeves’s old office was a ghastly sight, and the acrid smell of burnt wood still hung in the air. The horror of the fire’s aftermath lay before me on an otherwise beautiful afternoon, hot and still, with birds singing in the trees. I paused to watch a rabbit hop rather slowly across my path.
It was scary to think how quickly Reeves’s office had gone up in flames—and very lucky that neither Reeves nor his staff or any volunteers were inside at the time.
“Our worst nightmare”
Reeves had always worried that his office was a fire hazard. “When I would talk to volunteers about doing scanning and the digitizing process, I would say, ‘We're in a 100-year-old wooden building filled with paper. And our worst nightmare is that we’d have a fire.’ And that came true. That’s why we’ve been so diligent for the past decade in scanning all the records. And it's the only reason that it wasn’t more of a disaster than it was.”
He said most of the artifacts stored in the lab came from archaeological digs on the Montpelier grounds where enslaved people had lived and labored during the Madison family’s era. Relics dating back to the 1700s and 1800s included broken pieces of plates and bowls—“everything that you’d have on a table that was ceramic.” Wine bottles, tools, nails and animal bones from centuries ago were among the other items rescued from the blaze, along with numerous archaeological records.
Reeeves’s Ph.D. diploma from Syracuse University burned up in the fire along with other documents of personal value. He also lost a new bicycle and his trademark hat. As a sign of his colleagues’ affection for him and their shared hope for a fresh start, they gave him a replacement hat.
What about the carnelian ring?
Reeves has worked closely with the Montpelier Descendants Committee (MDC) on archaeology digs and on plans for a descendants memorialization project at Montpelier. Members of the MDC quickly found out about the fire and were very worried about all the artifacts and records. Reeves said some expressed particular concern about the fate of the carnelian ring—a woman’s ring with a red stone found in the South Kitchen area of the enslaved quarters. MDC member Bettye Kearse grew up hearing family stories about just such a ring passed down from her African ancestors to her ancestor enslaved at Montpelier. The carnelian ring discovered in the South Kitchen area “immediately became a touchstone for her,” Reeves said.
Fortunately, the ring is safe. Like most of the artifacts recovered from the blaze, it required a thorough cleaning to remove all the soot. Reeves said a shelf of ceramics in the lab was damaged because those items were near where the fire breached his office and swept into the lab, but there are plans to restore those items to their previous condition. Otherwise, "no other artifacts [were] substantially damaged in the fire.” In more good news, many of the paper records on file in the building had already been scanned and digitized. However, all the office computers were destroyed, and the buildings may be beyond repair.
Esso building to house archaeology office temporarily
Dance told me that the Esso building, a local landmark across Constitution Highway from Montpelier, has been selected as the temporary home for the archaeology program, but funding is needed to outfit the building for that purpose. Further, there are plans in the works to build a brand-new archaeology facility. That, too, will require new funding.
If you’re interested in supporting the archaeology program’s building projects, contact Eola Lewis Dance or Matt Reeves directly by phone or email. I’ll provide updates on plans for Montpelier’s new archaeology center as those plans evolve.