An Antrim workshop next to 230 Pleasant Street was destroyed by fire on Sunday morning. Fire Chief Marshall Gale said that neighbor Mary Payne reported black smoke and flames coming from the property at 10:25 a.m. on Sunday, and that responders had the blaze under control in about fifteen minutes. Owners Jeanne and David Cahoon were not home at the time, he said, and nobody was injured.
“We live below them, down a hill and we could see smoke from the area of their house,” Payne said. “I looked for a few minutes just to make sure it wasn’t [David] starting up a piece of equipment.” She said that after the smoke thickened, she called 911 as “flames shot up above the treeline.”
“My husband and both sons were here, and they went up to make sure there were no people or animals [in danger] because we couldn’t tell what was on fire,” she said.
“I feel so badly for [David] because he’s a self-employed logger. He lost a lot of the tools he uses,” Payne said.
Gale said the fire was fully involved when he arrived on scene, and had begun to spread into the woods. He said that he and neighbor Harry Payne were able to move a boat away from the fire before the engine arrived and the blaze got too hot, and that Payne stayed to help with the hoses on the truck.
“Obviously safety is paramount,” Gale said, but “we do our best to salvage any property.” He said the building was a total loss, but they worked to salvage a tractor and other tools. “These folks, they lost their livelihood as far as their business,” he said, and added that the fire also claimed two deer the Cahoons had recently shot and dressed.
Gale said the likely cause of the fire was a wood stove inside the shop, and the blaze ignited an acetylene bottle.
David Cahoon built the workshop 13 years ago, and it housed all the tools for his business, according to a family member.
“It’s just a lot of great memories… that got lost in that fire,” said Duncan Cahoon, the son of Jeanne and David. “We lost some really important stuff in there,” he said, including items with sentimental value, including tools and belongings from his grandparents. He said the deer lost to the fire was his mother’s, and it had been her first-ever time hunting. “It was a trophy deer. It was a monster,” he said.
Cahoon is currently attending college at Colby Sawyer, but said he came home the night of the fire. “It was devastating,” he said, recounting turning a baseball bat on a lathe with his father and “countless” snowmobiles, dirtbikes, and other projects he’d had in the shop.
“I brought all my stuff in there to work on it, even if it was running fine. I’d just tinker on it. If it wasn’t my stuff, I’d have my friends’ stuff in there,” he said.
Cahoon said that he and his parents had spoken in the past about building a bigger and better shop, and that he returned to the idea on Sunday night while he was home. He sees the fire as “more motivation and incentive” to bring their dream of an immaculate new shop to reality, but acknowledged that a new space would not have the same memories as the space that was lost.