Frog Hollow

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Susan Campbell. Frog Hollow

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FROG HOLLOW

Frog Hollow

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With Weed and others, Frog Hollow’s factory district grew, and by 1880 the neighborhood’s streets were laid out and the manufacturing heart of the city was beating fast. The increasingly crowded neighborhood drew tradesmen like Charles Thurston, a machinist who lived with his family at 18 Putnam Street. Thurston was one of nine hundred men who lost their tools in a suspicious fire at Colt’s in 1864. The fire was detected around 8 a.m. in the morning of February 4. The Portland brownstone walls and slate roof—thought to be fireproof at the time—were destroyed. The factory’s yellow pine floors had been soaked for nearly a decade with machinery oil, and when ignited they went up like a match—“faster than a man could run,” according to one eyewitness. Neighbors gathered and watched from nearby buildings as the ornate Byzantine dome fell within an hour of the fire’s detection.49 The Courant speculated that the blaze, which destroyed the older part of the factory, home to the most expensive machinery, was the work of an arsonist, though the miscreant was never found.50 Though he had to replace his tools, the booming economy delivered Thurston work fairly quickly and in his own neighborhood.

While Thurston was losing his tools, his neighbor, Peter Kenney, was trying to extinguish the flames. Kenney, also a Frog Hollow resident, Irish immigrant, and Colt’s employee, had been a volunteer firefighter for three years before the fire. He and others tried to save the factory, but the water supply was inadequate. The fire was especially damaging because it was during the height of the factory’s Civil War production. From the New York Times: “Those who had friends employed at the armory were foremost in the rush, and wives, mothers, and sisters, with anxious looks, made eager haste to the meadows. We have never witnessed so much excitement on a similar occasion. Seventeen or eighteen hundred workmen aroused by the sudden cry of fire in their midst could not well maintain among them all, perfect composure; and thus it was that in some instances the widest excitement ensued.”

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