From The Telegraph files This photo, most likely taken from an upper-floor apartment window in the Whiting Block, shows the destruction the former Franklin Opera House suffered in one of two general alarm fires that heavily damaged two city landmarks on successive days some 90 years ago next month. The lower floor served as a railway stop called Nashua City Station. (From The Telegraph files)

The 1930s are often referred to as “Nashua’s Disaster Decade,” and is understood to refer to the three calamities that visited these parts between May 1930 and September 1938.

Unless, of course, you count the Great Depression, which would bring it to four calamities within the ’30s. But it’s rarely recognized as part of Nashua’s Disaster Decade, perhaps because Nashuans, while certainly affected to some degree, seemed to weather, and emerge from, that economic disaster in comparatively decent shape.

Today’s topic, however, is fire – the disaster that visited Nashua quite a few times during Nashua’s Disaster Decade but is the only fire included in that roughly 9-year span.

That, of course, would be the Crown Hill fire, also known as The Nashua Conflagration, a blaze of unimaginable size and scope that blackened and flattened much of the city’s Crown Hill neighborhood the afternoon of May 4, 1930.

I started thinking about that snippet of time in Nashua history when I came upon a small photo, taken by an unnamed Telegraph photographer and later reproduced as a post card, depicting the near-total destruction of downtown Nashua’s historic, pre-Civil War brick edifice that housed, on the lower floor, a passenger rail station called Nashua City Station, and on the upper floors, a performance venue known as the Franklin Opera House.

Dean Shalhoup

Longtime reporter, columnist and photographer, is back doing what he does best ñ chronicling the people and history of Nashua. Reaching 40 years with The Telegraph in September, Deanís insights have a large, appreciative following.

But the raging fire that all but destroyed the opera house wasn’t the only show in town on that disastrous weekend some 90 years ago next month: Less than 24 hours later, a second general alarm blaze “wiped out,” as the Telegraph reported, The Nashua Theater, a circa 1880 landmark on Elm Street that housed a sporting arena and playhouse.

Together the two fires caused $130,000 in damage – roughly $2.24 million today – and were still smoldering when acting fire Chief A. C. Melendy, police Chief Irving Goodwin, and fire commissioners Herbert Lintott, Charles Austin and Eugene Duncklee trotted over to City Hall for a hastily-convened confab with Mayor William Sullivan.

I don’t have the minutes of that meeting – it’s doubtful any were taken anyway – but I’d imagine the men toggled between public damage control and sincere outrage among professionals whose jobs ?were to protect the people and property of Nashua.

“Prompt and Drastic Action Asked” read a headline on one of several smaller stories that appeared on page one of the Monday, April 20, 1931 Nashua Telegraph.

The page was topped by a huge headline in a bold, rarely seen font that stated, simply, “2 Landmarks Burn.”

The sub-headline, which read “Officials Probing Theory Fires at Opera House, Nashua Theater, (were) Set” lends credence to the lik?(e)lihood the City Hall meeting was emotionally charged.

A subsequent Nashua Telegraph story reported the men also “had a lengthy discussion (about) taking action on the numerous fires in the city, especially those of mysterious origin.”

Sullivan, the mayor, spoke with reporters after the meeting, and reading between the lines of the Telegraph story, he was understandably unhappy.

The commissioners “will take action at once to investigate the last two fires and will hold hearings,” Sullivan told reporters.

Police will “cooperate to the fullest extent in an effort to get at the causes (of) the fires,” he continued, making sure everyone knew that “it is the intention of the commissioners to invoke the law to the fullest extent to prevent careless and wanton destruction of property by fire.”

No more burning rubbish or brush, Sullivan said.

All Nashuans were probably getting sick and tired of worrying about fires breaking out, getting out of hand and destroying property, not to mention the possibility of hurting or killing people.

Almost certainly still fresh in Nashuans’ minds was the Crown Hill conflagration, which preceded the opera house and theater blazes by just 11 months.

That’s the kind of thing that tends to lay on one’s mind for a? while – especially if your family’s house was among those reduced to a cellar hole with pipes sticking out of it.

At least two other significant fires raised havoc between the Crown Hill blaze and the April blazes.

And don’t forget that less than two months into Nashua’s Disaster Decade occurred the general alarm fire that heavily damaged the entire Merchants Exchange building – and forced firefighters to do battle in temperatures around 20 degrees below zero, creating an ice-encrusted scene like something out of the show “Life Below Zero.”

Finding Telegraph stories or other information about the cause of the fires, or whether anyone was ever charged with setting one or the other, proved futile.

But a passage in a Telegraph editorial penned about two weeks after the fires served as something of a eulogy for the old opera house.

“For several years it was used principally as a store room for second-hand furniture … it has become worn out and tumbledown,” the editor wrote.

“At one time the pride of the northside (of the Nashua River) as an auditorium, the place had gone the way of all buildings. It had passed its usefulness, was out of date, begrimmed (whatever that means), besmirched … nothing but a shell.

“The fire fiend gave it a last, sad kick.”

I’m kind of glad whoever wrote that editorial won’t be around to write my eulogy.

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears weekly in The Sunday Telegraph. He may be reached at 594-1256 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.

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