Greg Hellman, The Examiner
2007-05-01 12:10:00.0
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WASHINGTON -

Artifacts of Washington’s history were damaged Monday, and some were destroyed, as a fire ripped through the Georgetown branch of the D.C. Library.

The building, at Wisconsin Avenue and R Street NW, was closed to the public for renovations when the fire began around 12:30 p.m., District chief librarian Ginnie Cooper said. All the workers safely escaped, she said.

“I have tears. This is a beautiful building,” Cooper said. “It’s so sad.”

The facility opened in October 1935 and was the first neighborhood library in the city system to have a separate collection on local history, housed in its Peabody Room.

Mid-Monday afternoon and with the roof already collapsed, the fire continued to burn three hours after firefighters arrived. It took them nearly five hours to extinguish the blaze. D.C. Fire Department spokesman Alan Etter said water would be poured on the building into the night to prevent flare-ups. Etter said initial damage assessments were still to come and the cause of the fire had yet to be determined.

Among the dozens of priceless historic documents and paintings housed in the library were a rare map of Civil War fortifications made inside the District and portraits of slaves dating from the early 19th century painted by Georgetown artist James Alexander Simpson, Peabody Room archivist and librarian Jerry McCoy said.

McCoy kept a rope on the ladder outside the red-bricked building to swing down in case of a fire and had always imagined that if he could save only one item, he would have grabbed the 1822 portrait of Yarrow Mamou, a black slave painted by the Georgetown artist.

But McCoy said he wasn’t at the library when the fire broke out Monday.

“Each one of those items is irreplaceable and I’m sure everything has at least water damage,” McCoy said. “This is my worst nightmare come true.”

Firefighters carried the burnt artifacts out of the building to a nearby sidewalk and laid them on a plastic tarp as library officials called for refrigerators to preserve the items.

“It’s a sad day here,” McCoy said.

The fire erupted only hours after 160 firefighters battled another blaze at the historic Eastern Market on Capitol Hill that began earlier Monday morning.