What happened in the Chestnut Street School fire in the 1970s?
We had a devil of a time trying to find a clipping on this one, but retired New Hanover County school superintendent Heyward Bellamy remembers it well. He says it happened early in the fall of 1973. (He had just driven his son back to college when it broke out.) The fire was hardly as serious as the May 16, 1971, fire at Hemenway Hall, which totally destroyed the historic former school building, cause hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage and burned county school records dating back to the 1890s. Recovery was fairly rapid, Bellamy said. Still, the elementary school students had to be shifted for awhile to temporary, often makeshift classes at New Hanover High School (many of them in the upper levels of the auditorium, Brogden Hall) and at Tileston School.
