The Ghost of Conconully
The Okanogan county seat was reduced to smoldering ruins in just two hours, leaving only the courthouse and schoolhouse standing.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Word has just reached Spokane that Conconully, the county seat of Okanogan county, was burned to the ground between 1 and 3 o'clock Tuesday morning. Nothing remains of the town proper save the schoolhouse, the courthouse, and a drug store. The fire started in a new store building recently erected by the R. Hunter Co. The townspeople were struck with awe and utterly helpless in their calamity; with the gale-force winds, nothing could be done to check the progress of the fire. I don't think there were twenty buckets of water used against it. The entire Main street was swept away in less than an hour. Within two hours, the entire town was a desolate stretch of smoldering ashes. About $100,000 in damages was estimated, with insurance covering only a fraction of that amount.
“The wind blew a perfect gale and carried blazing pieces of wood several hundred yards.”
Conconully remains a tiny, quiet community in the Cascades today, having never fully recovered its status after the devastating 1892 fire. Like many historic mining boomtowns in Washington, it serves as a stark reminder of the volatility of early frontier settlements that often burned to the ground before they could be properly established.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.