Monticello's Fire Loss is a Million.

Summer Hotels and Business Blocks Swept Night After 1,500 Visitors Danced.

One Dead, Three Injured.

Volunteer Firemen Work By Light of Flames Alone as Electric Lights Go Out-Guests Lose Their Belongings.
Special to the New York Times.

Monticello, N.Y., Aug. 11.-Encourage by what seemed to be the most promising season which their big summer resort had ever had, the hotel proprietors of Monticello gave an elaborate masquerade ball for their guests Monday evening. Fully 1,500 Summer folk danced in fancy costumes till long after midnight on the vast floor of the Casino, behind the Palatine Hotel. Less that twenty-four hours later, in the small hours of the morning, not only the beautiful dancing pavilion, but thirty-three other of the most important houses in the township-public buildings, hotels, department stores and business blocks were entirely razed by fire.

Many of the prominent businessmen of the community found that they had not only lost their fortunes and their homes overnight, but even whatever of wearing apparel did not happen to be on their backs when the conflagration started. The 1,500 Summer folk who had danced so light-heartedly and in such gala costume last Monday evening, were forced to stand out in the street all Tuesday night watching their hotels burn, and waited for hours in a long line, in all sorts of costumes yesterday, along Bedford Avenue, while an emergency long-distance telephone connection was being established with this city so that they could ask their friends to send them money and clothes.

The conflagration, when it had finally been hemmed in by hacking to pieces with axes the buildings in the path of it, proved to have been the cost of one woman's life, the injuring of three brave volunteer firefighters, and the complete destruction of close to a million dollars' worth of property.

Threw Herself From Window

The woman who was killed was MRS. MOLLIE BEDFORD, a widow, who worked in the Monticello Steam Laundry and who lived in the two-story frame building over the telephone exchange. She thought it was safe to stay in her room as long as she heard the plucky telephone girls moving about and calling up the Port Jervis, Liberty and Middletown Fire Departments on the floor below. The girls refused to be driven from their switchboards until the flimsy pine board structure around them began to crackle from contact with the blazing clapboards of the Norton Block.

When the lonely, frightened old woman had made up her mind to leave her room the stairs to the building were all ablaze. She ran to the window and, in spite of the warning shouts of the firemen, threw herself out. It was only a short fall, but she fractured bother legs and died six hours later in the parlor of DR. JAMES A. CAUTHER'S home, which had been turned into an emergency hospital.

The two main feed wires which come out under the southern eaves of Peter Murray Electric Lighting Power Plant on Broadway are the cause of Monticello's conflagration. The power plant is right back of Murray's-or rather was until yesterday-seventy-five-room-hotel, the Palatine. Immediately behind the power plant again was Mr. Murray's Palatine Casino. The two feed wires, investigation showed, became crossed by the high wind which blew all day. They began to "spark," and the sparks ignited the Georgia pine eaves and tar-papered roof. This happened at 8:30 o'clock in the evening when the whole Summer colony was either sitting on the hotel piazzas or looking into the attractive store windows along Broadway.

Everyone seems to have sat or stood dazed for a minute, watching the flaming cinders being thrown fiercely by the strong wind, settle on the wooden roofs of the Palatine Hotel, the Palatine Casino, and the buildings on the other side of a narrow lane. All these roofs were as parched as tinder, no rain having fallen on them for four weeks. Then, when the flames had spread to the roofs of NICOLADO'S Tailor Shop, Strong & Co.'s stationery store, and STEPHEN L. STRONG'S grocery, the men of the town suddenly roused themselves to a sense of what was happening, and half a dozen hands simultaneously seized telephones and called up City Hall to give the alarm.

Electric Lights Go Out.

Then something happened that may account for the small amount of personal property that was saved. Every electric light in the town-its street lamps, it store window bulbs, the lights in its residences-all went out three minutes after the fire was first seen. In rooms where one minute all had been clear as day rummaging women and children could not see their hands before their faces. There was only the light of the stars, the flicker of an occasional kerosene lamp in a servant's attic, and the constantly nearing flames on the near by buildings' roofs and sides. The whole town depends on its light from the electric power plant where the fire started.

With the tolling of the fire alarm bell in the City Hall belfry, the women and children piled out on the street helter skelter and impeded the men, who had thrown on a rubber coat or a helmet, and who were trying to couple up their hose nozzles on the hydrants in the dark. There are three fire companies in Monticello-all volunteers-the Neptunes, captained by JOHN J. BURNS, the Mountain Hose Company, captained by WILLIAM HINDLEY, and the Hook and Ladder, captained by CHARLES ROYCE. The Mountain Hose seems to be the first team to get a stream on the blazing Palatine buildings.

But by this time these had become a raging furnace. So quick had the three buildings kindled from one another that Mrs. MURRAY, the proprietors wife, when found seated on a red plush cushioned chair in a an outhouse among some chickens yesterday afternoon by a reporter for the Times explained tearfully that she had been able to save practically nothing in the whole house save the article of furniture on which she was sitting. She had been chatting with her son Charlie in one of the hotel rooms when the fire started. When once the flames of the blazing power plant touched the parched pine boards of the three-story frame hotel they had ignited like an old newspaper.

Continued, part 2 below
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Transcribed by June. Thanks June!