Fire which swept the Hayton Garage on N. Market St. early Wednesday morning completely destroyed the garage building and nearly 50 automobiles stored there with an estimated damage of $100,000. Thirty of the cars burned were owned by patrons of the garage.
The fire was the second during the night in the same block. An unoccupied dwelling house owned by A.B. McLaren adjacent to the rear of the south wall of the garage on Madison Street burned about 10:30 Tuesday night. The second fire which destroyed the garage may have been caused by the first fire, although both the Fire Chief James Swain and Maurice Hayton of the garage said Wed. morning they could not account for the second fire originating from the first. Chief Swain said he was positive that the garage fire was not ignited by sparks from the burning dwelling.
The roof of the garage was hit with electrical fire extinguisher used by the firemen after the first fire as a precaution against it catching. The fire department got the alarm at 3:30 o’clock Wed. morning when Clayton Stewart, night watchman at the garage ran to the fire station on Union Street and called the firemen. Stewart said that he had been unable to get a phone connection in order to give the alarm. This was explained by the theory that the telephone wires which enter the building from the rear where the fire was first discovered may have been burned through by the time Stewart got to the phone after discovering the blaze.
A call was immediately sent to the fire departments at Carbondale and Herrin. Thirty minutes after the call the Carbondale engine was at the scene of the fire. The Herrin fire department arrived a little later but did not connect with the plugs. Four streams of water were thrown on the fire but there was no chance to save the building or the contents. Fire Chief Swain said that 35 minutes after he arrived at the fire the building was demolished. The heat from the building was terrific and the fire spread so rapidly from the rear of the building to the front, that efforts to move some of the cars from the glass fronted display rooms had to be abandoned.
Explosions were frequent during the fire as the flames reached the gas tanks of the automobiles. The roof of the storage room fell in and the brick walls were partly crumbled by the heat. Maurice Hayton, proprietor of the garage, estimated the total loss at $100,000. The building had been appraised at $26,000. Mr. Hayton had been working on the books at the garage late Tuesday night and had left the ledger with approximately $5,000 in open accounts lying on a desk. The ledger was recovered after the fire and although partly burned, it is believed most of the accounts are intact. Considerable checks and automobile collateral in the office safe were saved.
In contending that the fire did not start directly from the burning dwelling house adjacent, Fire Chief Swain said that it was possible that the heat from the first fire had so heated gasoline and oil and other contents of the Hayton Garage until a fire was started by spontaneous combustion. That the flames swept the entire building almost immediately was apparent when one of the proprietors of the creamery on Madison St. near the rear of the Hayton garage said that he had passed the garage about twenty minutes before the alarm was given and that he saw no sign of fire.
The Hayton Garage was the largest garage building in Marion and one of the largest in the state. It was 300 ft long and 100 ft wide covering the width of the block between N. Market and Madison Streets. The building was erected by Hosea Cagle in 1915 and was operated by him for several yrs as a garage. It was later leased by John Whiteside who ran a garage there until after Cagle’s death when the garage building was sold through court to the Wesley Hayton of Carterville and Maurice Hayton of Marion operating as the Hayton Motor Sales Co.
The firm which came here with the Studebaker agency and first located in the old Goodall building had just recently taken over the Chrysler agency. How the first fire in the unoccupied house which may have been the indirect cause of the second fire is a mystery. Chief Swain said that he had learned that tramps stopping in the rail yards had been sleeping in the house and may have been responsible for the burning of the building.
That other fires were not started by the sparks being carried by the wind to other parts of the city was a surprise. Pieces of wood several inches wide from the roof of the burning garage were found in the south part of town Wed. morning. The work of the fire departments was responsible for the curbing of the flames in the one garage.
The gasoline and oil filling station operated by Will Wohlwend just south of the garage was threatened by the flames as was the garage of the Automotive Sales Co. adjacent to the north.
(Extracted from local newspapers and compiled by Harry Boyd, posted at http://www.marionfire.us/ )