News Reports
Fire quickly destroys Manchester Village inn
October 30, 2005
MANCHESTER – A fire triggered by a faulty clothes dryer engulfed a historic inn and restaurant early Saturday morning. No one was injured in the blaze; all of the guests were evacuated safely.
The main building of the Reluctant Panther, part of a three-building complex at the corner of West Road, Seminary Avenue and Route 7A in Manchester Village was declared a total loss by the Manchester Fire Department. The remnants of the structure will be razed for safety reasons, fire officials said.
"At this time it looks like an accidental fire," said Manchester Fire Chief Norman Bowen. "The building was totally involved within 15 minutes after we got here."
The fire was declared under control by 11:30 a.m.
The inn and restaurant – the only building in town painted purple – had been purchased within the last four weeks for slightly more than $3 million by Jerry Lavalley, 55, of Southlake, Texas. Lavalley said he. his wife and son, Matthew, had yet to fully move in.
The fire began around 8 a.m. when an inn employee told him she smelled smoke in the kitchen, Lavalley said.
After seeing smoke coming from behind a refrigerator, he ran down to the basement, where he found a clothes dryer was on fire, he said.
"I ran back upstairs, pulled the alarm and called 9-1-1, and by the time I got on the phone with 9-1-1, the kitchen was already full of smoke," he said.
Only one guest was staying in the building that caught fire. The other guests were staying in eight of the 21 rooms in the adjacent buildings. They were evacuated to three neighboring inns – The Equinox Hotel, the 1811 House and the Village Country Inn, which offered to take them in, Lavalley said.
Two guests, Jennifer Perzichezzi and Michael David, of Stamford, Conn., who were in Manchester for the weekend to celebrate their wedding engagement, got a close -up view of the fire.
"We were getting ready to go over for breakfast when we saw flames popping out of one of the windows," Perzichezzi said. "But it didn't seem that bad when it first started."
The first fire trucks arrived within 15 minutes, and at one point during the first 30 minutes of the fire, it looked as if it had been brought under control, David said.
But the middle section of the inn, originally constructed in the 19th century as a private residence, was quickly ablaze inside as firefighters from Arlington, Shaftsbury, Dorset, East Dorset, Peru, Winhall, Londonderry and Danby joined the Manchester fire department.
Rescue squads from Arlington and Manchester were also on the scene. Traffic was diverted around the site, causing temporary backups and delays along the side streets throughout the morning.
By 11 a.m., after the dense, pungent smoke began to clear, gaping holes were visible in the roof and most of the windows in the middle and south sections were smashed out.
The main building that was gutted by the fire was originally two separate homes, joined together by a mid-section moved from across West Road in 1897 as part of the original construction of the Mark Skinner Library, said local historian Mary Bort.
It had been an inn since the 1960s, Bort said.
The business had been sold by the Cornell family, the original innkeepers, to another family who in turn sold it to Maye and Robert Bachofen, the previous owners, in 1988, said Wayne Bell, a Selectboard member who said he had done roofing work on the building in the early 1980s.
The Bachofens had overseen a considerable amount of renovation, all of it meticulous and high quality work, he said.
The Bachofens are still living in Manchester but had left early Saturday morning for a vacation cruise and were unable to be immediately contacted about the fire, Lavalley said.
But Lavalley, who planned to run the inn and restaurant with his son Matthew, 22, a recent graduate of Texas Tech University, said he planned to rebuild as soon as possible.
It had been a long-term dream of his to own and run an inn, he said.
"I'm heartsick – we put so much of ourselves into wanting to have this place," he said. "We're going to rebuild it as good as it was. Maybe it's an opportunity – sometimes you get faced with challenges a little sooner than you thought."