Fire takes down Blue Hill History

Saturday February 5, 2011 a piece of Blue Hill History went up in flames. Residents of Otoe, Cass, Webster and Pine street, the neighborhood surrounding Trinity Lutheran Parochial school building, began to notice unusual activity as a single fire engine and a half dozen of Blue Hill's volunteer firemen arrive to participate in a controlled burn of the large two story brick building that had once housed the Trinity Lutheran parochial school. Barricades were set up on corners to keep vehicles at a distance. This was neighbors only notice that the controlled burn was about to take place. The morning was cold, windless and quiet as the stench of the fire began to fill the air. By 8 a.m. flames were bursting through the windows of the upper floor of the building. By 8 p.m. the fire truck was gone, the firemen were gone and the building was a pile of smoldering stinking rubble and ash beside a steel stairway, a fire escape that had become the stairway to nowhere. In be back of a pickup truck Kami Bumgardner fingers the keys of an old piano rescued from the building before the fire was set. On the other side of the pickup flames burst from the windows in the upper floor of the building.

Flames can be seen creeping up a stair way inside the building as the firemen set the flames that would eventually send the old building into the history book and out of the city.

A single fireman walks by on Webster street as flames burst through the windows on the top floor of the abandoned school that stood on that corner for nearly 80 years. For nearly 30 years the building had been used for little besides storage. The last school classes were held there in 1979.

Flames can be seen in openings of the building as it was ravaged and the structures integrity is destroyed and with the help of an excavator it begins to fall into a heap.

Snow is left on the front entrance steps of the building as flames destroy the once beautiful interior of the school where children were once instilled with christian values and given the knowledge to lead them into the productive lives that lay ahead of them. Smoke and ash rise from the burning rubble as the building has been destroyed by the fire and the excavator brought in is finishing off the destruction of the building.

In the right hand corner of this picture the roof of the Trinity Lutheran Church can be seen behind the smoldering pile of rubble and the big yellow excavator as it maneuvers around the piles of burned brick and steel.

Monday large machinery continued to remove rubble and haul in dirt to fill where the building had been. There is little left to be a reminder of what was once there.

Trinity Lutheran Church has not announced what it intends to do with the space gained by removing the building but local speculation is that the space may one day become a parking lot.