Billows of smoke still wafted up from the blackened rubble as Joe Brown drove by what remained of his Loudon home Sunday morning.

“Nothing else there,” he said, climbing out of his truck.

The night before, around 7:30 p.m., a fire had caught in his woodshed and spread to the rest of the house. Brown made it out with his phone to call 9-1-1, his wallet and one key. Everything else, he suspects – the mezzotint artwork hanging on the walls, the Lionel model train set from his childhood – is lost. So is his collection of about 1,200 glass bottles.

“I never got to build my case for them yet,” Brown said.

After staying with friends Saturday night, Brown said he couldn’t sleep and went back at daylight to survey the damage. The site, where firefighters from Loudon and surrounding towns spent all night containing and attempting to quell the fire, was still “so wet and soggy and messy,” Brown said, so he hasn’t yet sifted through the debris.

His parents bought the Currier Road farmhouse, built in 1820, during the Great Depression. Brown grew up in that house, which overlooked miles of scenic, rolling hills, and returned to it after retiring from the U.S. Army in 1992.

Brown said the property was a working farm during World War II. Around the 1960s it became a gentleman’s farm, but when Brown went into the military in 1967, he wasn’t around to take care of any animals. The house was also once a summer boarding home for people who came out to the country from the cities, and Brown had a sign with its name from back then – the “Grand View House” – hanging on the top of the woodshed.

“I have no reason to stay here. There’s nothing keeping me here, except I own the property here,” Brown said. “But it’s such a lovely spot, I hate to leave. It’ll take me two years or more to put a house there.”

A large red barn on the property survived unscathed. 

At least half a dozen neighbors stopped by to check on Brown and the house Sunday morning and recalled the scenic property and how well Brown had kept up the house.

“I’ve just admired this property my whole life and it’s just such a shame,” said Bryan McGinn, who lives nearby.

Jason Fiske, another neighbor and friend of Brown’s, saw a wisp of black smoke drifting upward while driving by Saturday evening. The fire hadn’t fully consumed the house yet, but as he pulled into the driveway he found Brown standing in the doorway. He yelled for him to get out. Fiske returned the next day to see the damage.

“I want to cry for him,” McGinn told Fiske as they walked back to their cars.

“Yeah, I know,” Fiske agreed. He recalled Brown’s willingness to help out his neighbors. “He’ll do anything for anybody. He does everything.”

Tom Blanchette, Loudon’s fire chief, said his crew – and those of many other surrounding towns – spent all night there extinguishing the flames. After receiving the call just after 7:30 p.m., the crew could see heavy smoke before arriving at the house. At that point, Blanchette requested a second alarm, extending the call for help to more surrounding towns. When the first team got on site and saw the sheer “volume of fire that they had,” they put out a third alarm to even more towns.

Because of the rural location’s low water supply, which meant it took more time to transport water from a nearby cistern and fire pond, Blanchette said they pivoted to containing the fire early on, hoping to protect the barn and other buildings near the property. Two firefighters were treated for minor injuries on the scene.

“He really lost everything, unfortunately, and I hate it for him,” Blanchette said. “We did what we could, but it was so much fire when we got there and just not enough water initially to overcome [it].”

Charlotte Matherly can be reached at cmatherly@cmonitor.com.