ALLEN TWP., Pa. — A two-story bank barn at Willow Brook Farms was destroyed by a fire that was so hot, it felled the barn’s silo before the rest of the wooden structure burned down to its concrete basement Saturday.
Donovan Smith, assistant superintendent for the adjacent Willow Brook Golf Course, which sits on the front of the former Fuller family property, said he was on his way home around 1 a.m. Saturday when his mother called to tell him that the barn was on fire.
“Sure enough, driving home I could see the fire from the road and I could see all the firetrucks here hard at work putting it out,” said Smith, who oversees the course with his father and lives nearby.
State police blocked off the area. Eight fire companies responded to the blaze, said Mark Kocher, first assistant chief with Allen Township Fire Company, bringing mostly tankers holding 164,000 gallons of water. The rear of the property where the barn sits, said Kocher, has no fire hydrants.
No animals, just straw
The barn has been vacant and unused for two years, Kocher said, but it was half-filled with loose straw used to bed horses.
The roof on the old clubhouse to the left of the barn caught fire too, but was able to be quickly extinguished.
Willow Brook is an equestrian facility that once offered on-site boarding, clinics, workshops and equestrian shows and sits on the edge of Willow Brook Golf Course. As far as Kocher knew, there are still four horses on the property. Two could be seen grazing in a field on the other side of the property, a few buildings between them and the still-smoldering barn.
Shortly after noon Saturday, though, no fire trucks remained on the scene. They were getting ready to appear in the Fireman’s Parade at 5:30 p.m. Saturday, a much-anticipated part of Northampton’s Community Days.
In their place, Kocher and Fire Capt. Mike Miller used apparatus that pulled water from Willow Brook Creek and into fire hoses to continue to control the fire, which had then become several steady, narrow billows of smoke and what Kocher said were indeed “small fires” that were still active deep within the piles of soaked straw.
“Small, foot-high active flames continue to pop up," Kocher said. "Typically with a barn fire, you get heavy equipment in and just rip it apart. That’s the only way to really put it out. But we have the fireman’s parade tonight. They’re going to end up ripping it down anyway for a housing development in two years. We’ll come back tomorrow and do a full extinguish tomorrow.”
No animals or people were in the barn when the fire started and no one was injured. The cause has yet to be identified.
Tom Hagen lives about 200 yards from the barn and is a semi-retired former caretaker for the Fullers, the original owners of the property. Unsure if it was related, Hagen said he heard fireworks, which is not uncommon with the nearby housing development that went up in the last few years.
“I was watching television, I heard fireworks, and then I see this brightness behind the building and thought, 'Oh my God,' so then right away I called 9-1-1 and told them what’s going on,” Hagen said.
Then he said he called Whip Hussmann, who runs the horse farm.
Hussmann, the farm manager, could not be reached for comment.
“I don’t know if it was the fireworks, I guess we’ll find out," Hagen said of the potential cause. "People come in and out of here all the time now, and it’s another way to get to the golf course.
"It’s a lot more busy than it was when Mr. Fuller was alive. He never wanted anyone on this property.”
“Ironically we had a fire in the same barn (back in 2011). We got very lucky, it was just a light receptacle that had caught fire. So we got extremely lucky that time.”Allen Township Assistant Fire Captain, Mark Kocher
The barn was built in the 1930s, said Duane Smith, the golf course superintendent, who said the mansion on the property had a fire in 2000, caused when a squirrel chewed a wire in an easeway.
“Ironically we had a fire in the same barn (back in 2011). We got very lucky, it was just a light receptacle that had caught fire. So we got extremely lucky that time,” Kocher said.
“We used to come down here to the main arena, every month we’d be out here watering it down for them, to keep the dust down during the horse shows,” he said of the fire department’s past relationship with the farm.
Fire Capt. Miller said the fire is under investigation.
Allen, East Allen, Northampton, Bath, Hanover, Hecktown, Woodlawn and Klecknersville fire companies showed up to help put out the blaze.
Colonel James W. Fuller started the farm. His vision to assemble a number of farms in the Catasauqua area eventually culminated in close to 1,800 acres, where he eventually resided. He was the president of the Fuller Co., which manufactured equipment for the cement industry.
