CHAPTER XXV
 

in Hagerstown.
1820.
 

N THE night of the fifth of December,
1871, a fire whicli started in an agricul¬
tural implement store on Antietam street,
opposite the Baltimore & Ohio railroad
station, destroyed St. John's Episcopal Church on
South Jonathan street, and the Court House.
These were two of the most imposing buildings
Both of them were built about
It was believed that the fire was started by
an incendiary. A high wind was blowing at the
time, and the business part of the town was in
great danger; it was saved from destruction only
by the determined work of the fire companies, aid¬
ed by the citizens generally. Then, and for many
3'ears afterwards, the only water supply for the
fire engines was from the Oak Spring, Ladle
Spring and several large public cisterns. There
was one steam fire engine, and several yvhich were
operated by hand. With this imperfect apparatus
the town was saved, the damage to the other build¬
ings which took fire being slight. The reason the
church and .Court House could not be saved yvas
that both were covered with shingle roofs high
and inaccessible to the firemen. In attempting
to reach the Court House cupola, John Fridinger,
a fireman, was killed by the fall of the cupola, and
Henry Bester was severely hurt. In the follow¬
ing Alay, while the walls of the old Court House
were being razed, to make place for the new build¬
ing, a rear wall fell upon three workmen, namely,
Alexander Smith, AVesley Finnegan and Freder¬
ick Fridinger, and crushed them to death. By a
strange chance one of the killed, Frederick Frid¬
inger, a youth of seventeen years, was a son of
John Fridinger, who lost his life in the fire.    The
 

actual values destroyed by the fire was not large.
All the land and other records of the County and
the wills and papers in the office of the Register of
Wills were in good fire proof vaults, one in the
clerk's office and one in the office of the Register
of Wills. All these records were uninjured.
There was some discoloration, by smoke, but no
substantial harm w-as done. The papers and rec¬
ords of the County Commissioners oflice were in
an iron safe, and they too escaped injury. On
the Court House there was no insurance. The
building had cost originally about $70,000 but it
was not a well arranged Court House and its
destruction caused no permanent loss to the peo¬
ple. In its issue of December 13, 1871, the
Herald and Torch Light said:

"As the venerable Temple of Justice was fall¬
ing a prey to the flames, there were not a few of
our older citizens who gazed upon it with sad¬
dened eyes, and called from the store-house of
memory many pleasant and possibly also some
unpleasant associations with it. The last trials
that took place in the original Court House, which
stood in the Public Square, were those of the
three Cotterills, father and two sons, convicted and
hung for the murder of Adams, their uncle, the
parties being all Englishmen. This was at the
November Term in the 3-ear 1819, the executions
having taken place in the month of February 1820,
so that the first Court must have been held in
the late building in March of that year. We are
informed that it was commenced about the year
1818 and completed two years thereafter. Its
original cost was not less than sixty or seventy
thousand dollars, and the frequent alterations to