A fire gutted an historic apartment building in Pawhuska overnight, spewing out so much heat that it damaged two fire trucks and a neighboring house.
The four-story, six-unit Virginia Apartments at 10th and Kihekah were built in 1922. They had been unoccupied, and the gas or electric service had been cut off more than a month ago, according to Pawhuska Fire Chief Gip Allen.
The fire was reported at 1:50 a.m. Friday and firefighters, stationed four blocks away, were on the scene a minute later. The building was fully engulfed in fire when they arrived.
State Fire Marshal investigator Terry Smith was on the scene Friday morning and said that the fire appeared to have started in the front west corner of the building. The cause is unknown.
An earlier fire broke out in the same area of the building on Feb. 15, when a couch, whose charred frame remains on the sidewalk in front of the building, burned.
No one was hurt in that fire or in Friday's blaze, but Letty Bradley, the lone neighbor, was evacuated from her house, whose shutters melted from the heat.
"I was sound asleep," Bradley said. "The police kicked down the door and came into my bedroom saying 'Police! Police! You've got to get out.'"
Bradley said that the front door to the apartment building as well as the doors to the apartment had all been left open since the building was vacated.
She also said that a half-hour before the fire was reported, her Rottweiler dog, Babygirl, had barked. "I went out on the porch and looked and didn't see anything," she said. "And a half hour later, it was ablaze."
Two Pawhuska fire trucks were damaged when the fire explosively spread up a stairwell in the building. A snorkel truck's paint blistered and lens covers on the lights of two trucks melted.
The building has been owned by Terry Kennedy of Wynona since 2007, when he bought it for $150,000. It is insured, Allen said.
Firefighters were on the scene for eight hours, putting out the fire and hotspots, but it continued to smolder all day Friday, sending plumes of acrid smoke that smelled of sulphur over the town.
The apartment building was past its glory days and had deteriorated over the past five years.
Hubert Sweeden, who is a few days shy of 90 years old, owned the building for 35 years before he sold it in 1990.
"it was the most luxury apartment building in Pawhuska back in those days," Sweeden said. "Every apartment had hardwood floors, a fireplace, a dressing room and a porch, and way up there on the front of it, it had a headstone engraved in gold."
When the federal and state governments began building subsidized housing, the Virginia lost its clientele and its long waiting list for apartments.
"People would spend $65 or $75 a month to rent one, but not when the government came in and started renting them for $6 or $7 a month," he said. "That put apartments out of business."
Lore has long had it, Sweeden said, that the Virginia was built by an Osage Indian during the oil boom of the 1920s, and named it for his daughter.
Facts, however, seem are at odds with that oral history. Property records show that it was completed in 1922, when it was owned by William and Margaret Bawbell, white people who had three sons. They sold it in late 1922 to Clarence Lohman, a man of German origin who was born in Virginia.
(Photo credit: Brian Chris Rumsey/Pawhuska Police Department)
