The aftermath of the July 15 fire on Friday, August 12, 2022 in Downtown in Tappahannock, VA.
The aftermath of the July 15 fire on Friday, August 12, 2022 in Downtown in Tappahannock, VA.
Late on the morning of July 15, Joey Reinhardt was at his desk at Barbour Printing, the Tappahannock company his family has owned for decades, when he received an alert on his phone: a fire in progress.
As a volunteer firefighter with the Tappahannock-Essex Volunteer Fire Department since he was 18, Reinhardt, now 51, has learned to take such startling notifications in stride.
Most of the time, though, the fire being reported is not across the street.
With a sense of urgency, Reinhardt hustled out of his office door and raced across Prince Street — “Oh, yeah, it was a run,” he said — to make sure people in the Martin-Sale Furniture Co. building, where the fire had started, were getting out. Once he saw they were, he headed down the block to Prince Street Café to alert employees and diners eating an early lunch that Friday. He suggested employees move their vehicles from the parking area in the back and then helped make sure upstairs apartments were vacated, and they were.
Though the fire hadn’t reached that row of brick storefronts, Reinhardt knew it could — old buildings, close together in the town’s historic district. The time to clear the buildings was right then.
“Then it was just a matter of needing a whole lot of firetrucks,” Reinhardt recalled in an interview Friday, “and a whole lot of water.”
The fire did indeed spread, destroying most of the buildings on that stretch of Prince Street along with adjacent structures on Water Lane. In all, several businesses were displaced — including the furniture outlet (although the main Martin-Sale store across the street remains in operation), the café, a real estate office, a hair salon and an art studio — as well as four families who lived in apartments in the affected structures.
The damage is estimated at $2.5 million, said Thomas M. Blackwell, Essex County’s commissioner of the revenue.
The fast-moving fire quickly overwhelmed local firefighting crews, and more than 100 firefighters from more than a dozen other jurisdictions answered the call for assistance, said Tappahannock-Essex Fire Chief Paul Richardson. Water had to be pumped from the nearby Rappahannock River to extinguish the blaze, which smoldered until a weekend storm doused it for good.
“Biggest fire I’ve been on,” said Richardson, who has served with the department for more than 40 years and has been chief for much of the past two decades. He said last week that the cause of the fire remains undetermined and what started it likely will never be known.
Several firefighters were treated for heat exhaustion and minor injuries, but otherwise there were no serious injuries other than a pet cat that reportedly perished in the fire.
The damaged area has been fenced off while insurance companies complete their work. There is no timetable for the rubble to be removed, though town officials hope it will begin soon.
An aerial view from Friday shows the area at Prince Street and Water Lane in Tappahannock that was burned out in the July 15 fire.
In the month since the fire, the community has rallied to assist those who were affected — the last of the families displaced by the blaze was scheduled to go into new accommodations this past week — and there is a common refrain of perseverance and confidence to overcome what Town Manager Eric Pollitt said might have been a “knockout punch” for other communities.
“I think this really shows the resolve of this community,” said Pollitt, who was in Staunton for his wedding the weekend of the fire. “I really think people here are going to do whatever we need to do to make sure something positive comes from this and that it doesn’t define us in a negative way.
“It’s going to take a few years — it’s not going to happen overnight — but I think we’re really going to build something special down there.”
Tappahannock is a waterfront town with a population of about 2,000, a gateway to the Northern Neck, via the Downing Bridge, when traveling on U.S. 360 from Richmond.
The seat of Essex County, Tappahannock is the oldest town in the county. It has a Native American history that goes back long before Captain John Smith visited in 1608. Several centuries-old structures still stand, including the Ritchie House, which was built in 1706 and stands at Prince and Cross streets — on the same block that burned. The brick dwelling, which now houses a law office, survived last month’s fire, just as it did a similarly devastating blaze in the same block in 1917.
A tornado in 2016 that cut a swath through the town, destroying numerous buildings and injuring more than two dozen people, also tested Tappahannock’s grit, recalled Reinhardt.
Residents responded then, as did neighboring communities — just as they have in the past month.
“It’s just incredible,” Reinhardt said.
He noted in particular how Tappahannock’s rival town, Warsaw, just across the bridge in Richmond County, among other assistance, immediately donated money from its next summer concert.
The cleanup continued Sunday in Tappahannock where a fast-moving fire swept through numerous…
“To me, it’s how life is in a rural area,” he said. “You look out for each other.”
The last month has been “emotional, definitely,” said Beth Sharpe, executive director of Tappahannock Main Street, a nonprofit organization that is part of a national network striving to revitalize small towns.
“But it has been also filled with a lot of pride in our community,” said Sharpe, who organized a GoFundMe that has raised more than $42,000 to assist those affected by the fire.
Sharpe was a few blocks away from Prince Street — in a classroom at nearby St. Margaret’s School, attending a meeting of the Virginia Rural Leadership Institute — when she received a text message about a “big fire.”
By the time she got her first look, the smoke was thick and black and flames were shooting several stories into the air, and sirens were approaching town one after another, a sure sign of distress, but, as she said, also a sign of hope that so many people from outside the community were coming to help.
She began mobilizing local merchants: a supermarket sent provisions for first responders as did pizza restaurants; a home improvement store offered any necessary supplies. Later, churches set up meal trains for the displaced residents, she said. That sort of assistance continued in the ensuing weeks.
Pollitt said state and local elected officials, as well as government professionals from other jurisdictions, have been quick to offer support and encouragement.
A series of down-home fundraisers — from lemonade stands to a pancake breakfast Saturday, from T-shirts to Michelle’s Sweet Treats in Warsaw holding cake auctions — have helped those reeling from the fire.
“I couldn’t even begin to name all of the organizations and individuals and groups who have come together to really focus on the future,” Sharpe said.
Part of envisioning the future includes salvaging bricks from the rubble — a volunteer effort is being planned — and preserving them for use in future development in the area as part of sidewalks or a statue or something.
“We don’t know what that looks like right now,” Sharpe said. “But we have one chance to save a piece of this history, and this is our chance.”
Sharpe said there were already plans underway to revitalize Tappahannock’s downtown, and now she said Tappahannock Main Street is there to work with the private property owners of the burned-out block to help them reach “whatever their final goal” will be as far as rebuilding.
“There’s a lot of momentum here still,” she said. “It’s horrible ... but we just have to keep moving.”
When she saw the flames, Hannah Overton Tiffany, owner of Tiffany Properties Realty, was on her way back to the office. She’d been in that space, next door to Prince Street Café, since February 2020. She parked near the bridge and ran down the street, which was already blocked off, telling anyone who tried to stop her that she needed to rescue her office cat, Victor.
At that point, the fire had yet to spread beyond the furniture store. When she arrived at her office, Victor was waiting beside the door.
“I grabbed Victor and ran back to the car,” she said.
Though a cat in a nearby apartment reportedly died in the blaze, Victor survived and is doing well in Tiffany’s new office a couple of blocks away.
“The biggest loss was our files,” said Tiffany, though she noted the fire really has not affected her business like it did others. “It was painful and hard to deal with, but we just kept selling. Real estate is a fairly portable business. We just kept on rolling.”
The same couldn’t be said for Prince Street Café, a popular dining spot that was just shy of celebrating its first anniversary, or George Jennings’ art studio, which was on the other side of the café. Jennings, a retired architect-turned-artist, lost 55 years of architectural records plus about 70 framed paintings in his studio and another 17 on display at the café, where he not only sold his work but would get lunch.
“People would buy them at the café and then come over to meet and talk to me. It was a fabulous situation. It really was like family,” said Jennings, his voice cracking with emotion.
Jennings, 79, has been mostly painting for the past seven years, operating under the studio name of G Booker Jennings. (On his website, he explains that Booker is his middle name and that he didn’t want to be confused with another artist named George Jennings who “is quite good. Look him up.”)
Jennings was in the studio when the fire broke out in the furniture store. He was alerted to the fire and advised to move his SUV parked behind the building, which he did. By the time he returned from moving the SUV to safety, there was too much smoke to re-enter the building and retrieve anything from the studio, including the keys to an old pickup truck that also was parked behind the building.
Several of his paintings — besides the ones he’s sold over the years — survive at Tappahannock Art Gallery.
The cleanup continued Sunday in Tappahannock where a fast-moving fire swept through numerous…
“I think we have seven of his paintings,” Liz Harper said of the small, nonprofit, volunteer-run gallery that suffered melted vinyl siding from the fire but has continued to operate. “His paintings are in a lot of homes and places all over the world. Boy, I wish I had bought more.”
Jennings, who specializes in plein air painting, is starting his studio again in space he’s leasing in the building Tiffany is using for her real estate office. He’s settling in and feeding Victor the office cat, but he has not resumed painting. It’s been too hot for outdoor painting, he said, plus his mind just hasn’t been in the right place for it.
In addition, a new easel had been delivered to him from Italy just before the fire.
“It’s gone,” he said.
He’s ordered a replacement, but, “Now, I have to wait for Italy to send me another one.”
Meantime, he’s been the recipient of sweet gestures from people, such as the anonymous person who sent him “everything I need to paint — a couple of panels, brushes, brush cleaner.” Jennings noted a few of his supplies survived the fire because he painted a scene the night before and then stashed his materials in the trunk of the vehicle he rescued. It was a bit of good fortune in a largely bleak experience.
Despite everything, Jennings said he’s found himself feeling unusually positive in the past month, thinking about what the future might hold for the devastated block, for Tappahannock and for himself.
“Tappahannock’s a quirky little place, very independent,” said Jennings, who’s lived in town since 2002 when he purchased a 300-year-old house to renovate. “We’re keeping our heads up and moving forward.”
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www.gofundme.com/f/tappahannock
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The fire swept through downtown buildings in Tappahannock on July 15.
The aftermath of the July 15 fire on Friday, August 12, 2022 in Downtown in Tappahannock, VA.
An aerial view from Friday shows the area at Prince Street and Water Lane in Tappahannock that was burned out in the July 15 fire.
The aftermath of the July 15 fire on Friday, August 12, 2022 in Downtown in Tappahannock, VA.
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