Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 25, 1995 TAG: 9504250102
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Structural engineers will study the ruins - four exterior walls and a bell tower - and see this week if they think any of it can be saved.
Engineers hired by the church walked inside the old building Monday morning. Yet, more than two days after Saturday's devastating fire, investigators have yet to enter the building.
"I stepped in the back door to take a picture - that's as far as I went," Fire Marshal Eddie Fielder said. He's waiting for an OK from Acting Fire Chief Billy Southall; Southall said he won't give the go-ahead without the approval of city engineers.
Without that, Southall said, "We're not going to let anybody go inside the building. The building's unsafe. I wouldn't want to go in the building myself."
Meanwhile, rain has fallen through the burned-out roof onto the church floor, and at least a few people have stepped in the rubble and any evidence it might contain.
Evelyn Bethel, president of Historic Gainsboro Preservation District Inc., urged City Council on Monday to find out how the fire started. She said outsiders have come into Gainsboro before and set fires. "This has been happening for years. We need to know what caused that fire."
Public Safety Director George "Chip" Snead told council of the damage to what remains of the 97-year-old church: critical problems with two walls and a serious crack and failing steel beams in the bell tower.
Nevertheless, the church's pastor said he hopes at least some of it can be saved. "I think after we get through the mourning process, the grieving process, I think we can get down to some creative thinking on stabilizing what's there," the Rev. Kenneth Wright said.
His congregation moved out of the old church in 1982, built a modern one in the next block of Jefferson Street and leased the old building to a coalition of arts groups that had planned to create a cultural center.
Before First Baptist moved, it took out the old building's stained-glass windows and installed them in the new church. "Now I know why," Wright said, thinking how they, too, would have been destroyed in the fire.
Southall said the construction of the building and 15-mph winds Saturday night made the fire particularly hard to control. He said a fire engine arrived three minutes after the first alarm and, although some residents thought firefighters had trouble hooking up to hydrants, Southall said they had no difficulties with either hydrants or water pressure.
But, he said, the fire "had such a head start on us. It was coming through the roof before our guys ever got the alarm." The first firefighters went inside the church to try to attack the fire from within. Then, Southall said, "the fire started to fall in around them. It was just a mission impossible." The fire had to be fought entirely from the outside.
Besides the heavy winds, he said, the fire generated its own thermal wind inside the church, with the bell tower acting as a kind of flue and the church pews and decorative woods feeding the flames.
Rusty Pritchett, a restoration consultant working for the artists coalition, Arts Place at Old First, was in the church Friday afternoon to make sure two 5-ton furnaces had been delivered and to lock up the church.
Pritchett, a trustee of the Roanoke Valley Preservation Foundation, had been working on the restoration for three years. He and other workers for contractor D. Baker & Co. Inc. were trying to open the church for children's art classes this summer. They had painted and reinstalled exterior wood, laid flooring and put in two bathrooms.
"It was a wonderful structure," he said. "It can be rebuilt. We've done worse than this."
To help in the decision-making on the church, John Kern, regional director of the state Department of Historic Resources, said his office is bringing in a Richmond structural engineer who assessed tornado damage to historic Petersburg buildings a few years ago.
Granger Macfarlane, president of Arts Place, said Roanoke needs to at least try to save First Baptist. "The African-American community has had a number of churches disappear over the years for any number of reasons - growth, changes in neighborhoods, relocation of people. This church, because it was so old and because it was the first major African-American church west of Richmond, had a special meaning."
by CNB