Retta Presby Weaver sat in her armchair on Tuesday, eating dinner and listening to the news like on any other evening.
The chatter of news anchors drowned out what was happening outside her home atop a peaceful, rolling hill in Loudon. It wasn’t until neighbors, who saw the flames licking the 19th-century barn behind Presby Weaver’s house, began to bang on her door that she realized anything was wrong.
“By the time I walked out … the flames were all the way up, coming out the roof, and the embers were floating by here. I could feel the heat of it,” she said.
Presby Weaver, 85, grabbed her cat, Morris, her coat and her phone and rode in a neighbor’s truck down the hill to get to safety and clear the way for firefighters. Aside from a scant few hours of sleep, she spent the night watching out her neighbor’s window.
“I just sat there praying that I wasn’t going to see flames in the house section because I knew the barn was gone,” Presby Weaver said. “I have this image in my head … With all that flame from inside, you could see the frame of the barn [and] you could see the corner posts … It was an inferno.”
The next morning, a steady stream of firefighters, electricians and utility workers traipsed through her property, the wheels on their vehicles crunching the gravel driveway as they wound up, up and around the steep hill on Presby Lane, off Route 129.
The barn, which Presby Weaver estimated had stood on the property since the 1830s, burned to the ground. Charred scraps, cinderblocks and metal sheets lie in mounds where the historic structure once stood. The acrid tang of smoke mingled with the scent of churned-up earth.
The house is virtually untouched. No one was injured, Presby Weaver said, and she said she doesn’t know how the fire started. The Loudon Fire Department didn’t return a request for comment prior to deadline.
It’s thanks to the firefighters and an uncharacteristically windless night on the hilltop, Presby Weaver said, that she still has a roof over her head. Firetrucks, including from other towns, lined Route 129 and ran a hose up the hill to transport water, she said.
“The house was saved, and that is incredibly important,” Presby Weaver said. “To think of losing everything like that.”
The property itself has lived many lives. It was once the town farm, Presby Weaver said, where the town cared for poor, sick and elderly people. Many of those town farms were sold to private owners after the Civil War, she said.
Her parents bought it in 1940, Presby Weaver said. As she grew up there, it served as a big dairy farm in the ’50s and ’60s. It overlooks Upper City in Pittsfield, where she went to high school.
Presby Weaver said she now leases the barn, and part of her property, to sugarmakers who tap the maple trees there and who stored equipment in the barn.
She said the loss of the barn and its contents is minimal in comparison to what could’ve happened.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, before taking it back. “I shouldn’t say it doesn’t matter. It matters a lot. But what I have, still have, is wonderful.”
She’s slowly coming out of shock, she said as she wrapped a blue fuzzy blanket around her shoulders and sat back down in her armchair.
“I haven’t even cried yet, but I will. That’s OK,” she said. “That’s healing.”
