Second Burning of
W.C.T.U. Settlement School in Knott County
COST WAS $10,000
Women at Head Are
Planning to Raise Money for New Structure.
On Wednesday
night,
November 5, 1905, all the buildings of the
Woman's
Christian Temperance Union Settlement and School
at Hindman, Knott County, burned. The fire, which broke
out during the night destroyed the school house, the
work shop and the dwelling house, from which some of the
scholars barely escaped with their lives, losing all
their clothes and other belongings, The loss from that
fire was twenty-five thousand dollars.
While the embers
of that fire were smoking the people of Hindman and the
women who had established the school began to raise
money to rebuild, and almost before the ground was cold
work began to erect new buildings. By the first of
August of this year, there were three new buildings
built to take the place of those which had been burned,
a school
house, a power
house and a dwelling house. School opened August the
first with 220 pupils. Yesterday morning the news came
to Lexington that the school house had been destroyed by
fire. It was a two-story building, with a basement, the
first story of logs and the
second
story of shingles, containing seven recitation
rooms and a chapel with a
seating
capacity of between three and four hundred. It
was lighted with electricity and heated by steam,
generated by the power house. The building cost $10,000.
It was insured for something, but for how much it was
impossible to learn last night.
There is no
explanation of how the fire started. The electric lights
are shut off at 10 o'clock every night and the building
locked up. It was 12 o'clock when the fire was
discovered and there was no way of saving it.
There is no school
in
Kentucky which has done and is doing a greater
work than the Hindman school and in spite of the
terrible loss of this second fire the women who have
been at the head of it are not discouraged and are
already planning to raise the money to erect a new
building.
Miss Katherine
Pettit and
Miss Mary Stone are now in Hindman and the news
of the fire came from them. The faculty of the school
consists of eight teachers, of whom Miss Bigelow is
principal and one, Miss Margaret Gilchrist, is from
Lexington.