PLEASANTVILLE

News of Pleasantville
By
Kathy Coffaro
The Great Pleasantville Fire
published in The Titusville Herald 12/22/09

The Great Pleasantville Fire
Yesterday, 138 years ago, downtown Pleasantville burned to the ground. A telegraph sent to the Titusville Herald (then the Titusville Morning Herald) at 3 in the afternoon reported the town was on fire. It was Thursday, Dec. 21, 1871. The well known 1879 History of Venango County misstates the date as 10 a.m. on the 23rd. It was all over by Saturday morning, Dec. 23, and nearly seventy percent of downtown Pleasantville lay in charred rubble. Cut-stone hitching posts, sections of iron fencing, and scorched bleak trees stood forlornly on the white snow that had been thrown against blazing buildings and on firefighters who doused themselves to combat the heat.
The fire, discovered by an employee, started in the chimney at the New York Hotel on South Main Street, known only as Main then. This would be where the parking lot of the empty supermarket is now. The flames quickly ignited the Chase House which was across the street, by the current 1961 post office. The Chase House had been moved from Pithole in 1868 at the height of oil activity in the borough. It was as fine old building said to have cost $80,000 to originally construct in 1865 and was jammed between other oil boom businesses in Pleasantville, all wood framed structures except one. The Brown Brother�s store was the only brick building erected before the Great Fire of 1871 and it stood afterwards.
Dozens of shops burned down on the St. Nicholas Block that ran 100 feet on both Main and State Streets. Coal Oil Johnny�s, Nancy�s Bulk Food, and the vacant market, occupy the area now. The McKinney House, on the opposite corner where Northwest is, was destroyed by the time The Herald reporter reached the scene. Named the Union Hotel during the oil boom, the McKinney had been a highly lucrative business. An 1868 article in The Herald describes the Union as the only hotel on the Hilltop, reporting it housed up to 100 guests a night and sometimes turned away 75. The Chase House arrived on the Hilltop in August of the same year with accommodations for 200.
The fire raced up East State Street from the McKinney, destroying several buildings, mostly stores with apartments above. This would be where the laundromat, Mr. Rod�s, the Allis home, Presto home, and other post 1872 buildings are now. The Titusville Fire Department arrived around 5:00 p.m. with the horse-drawn steamer Col. Drake, fire hose, and a crew of volunteers. The roaring flames had subsided and the water was gone. The Titusville men assisted locals in tearing down burning buildings to reduce airborne embers. No deaths or injuries were reported other than H. Locke�s fall from a ladder into smoldering debris that burned his face. Several teamsters hired to remove store inventory made off into the night and never returned. Most of the buildings and contents were insured. Manley C. Beebe, the Harvard educated architect who designed the Pleasantville Municipal Building and later acted as justice of the peace and postmaster, often submitted articles to The Herald, usually on Hilltop history. In 1937 he said it was just as well the business section burned down. Too many businesses had sprung up during the oil boom and were on their way to becoming �eyesore� and �superfluous,� since the population had steeply declined by 1871. Beebe�s grandfather of the same name, Manley C. Beebe, served on a committee that convened a few days after the disaster to provide relief for fire victims. Displaced families had found immediate shelter within the homes of Pleasantville�s generous residents and the committee raised funds for additional assistance. An estimated 40 people were left homeless. The Holemans, Browns and other Hilltop families had the money to erect the stately new brick buildings.
By Christmas 1871, four days after the Great Fire, plans had begun to build a new Pleasantville. Within a few years, three substantial brick buildings, all gone now, replaced the charred remains at the Corners. The Holeman Building was the last to go and went by way of the St. Nicholas Block it replaced. Pleasantville business owner Bill Otto called in the fire on Christmas Eve, 1992, around 3 a.m. It was a Thursday, the same day of the Great Fire of 1871. The historic Holeman building was later razed by bulldozers. In 1992, it housed Brown�s Golden Dawn, a supermarket. John Peterson was once a co-owner of the building and ran a grocery store there. At the time of the 1992 fire, he was a state senator and had an office in the old Holeman building. Many of his personal and professional papers went up as quickly as documents destroyed in the Great Pleasantville Fire of 1871.

Contributed by Kathy Coffaro
kcoffaro@roadrunner.com