PicoBlog

Around 1am on Friday, March 1st, 2024, a fire began at Estate of Mind, in the historic Oakhurst Manor in Whitinsville, MA. As firefighting efforts began and the flames receded, it seemed promising that it would be contained and extinguished with minimal damage, and we made the decision and announcement to cancel our large event the next day.

Over the next 6 hours, residents watched in horror as the fire continued to re-ignite, growing to consume the entire attic, most of the third floor, and parts of the second. It was finally extinguished after dawn. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water were used to put out the fire, thoroughly soaked the lower floors of the building, and flooded the basement multiple feet deep.

We are devastated. Without time to grieve or process our personal losses, we now find ourselves dealing with many urgent aspects of the aftermath.

Compounding the effects of this tragedy:

We have included more details about both of these concerns below. In this article, we have also included our more urgent calls for community support, details about the fire itself, and addressed some of the rumored causes of the fire.

Our gratitude goes out to everyone who has helped already or offered their support.

• Many first responders and others on scene in the first few hours are responsible for ensuring the physical safety of our residents and neighbors and saving the remaining parts of the building.

• We are thankful to the fire departments from Northbridge, Sutton, Grafton, Hopedale, Uxbridge, Douglas, Mendon, Webster, Dudley, Hopkinton, Milford, and Blackstone, police from Northbridge as well as state police, Northbridge DPW, representatives from Whitinsville Water Company, National Grid, and Eversource, and any others involved in responding who we have overlooked here.

• We are thankful for food, toiletries, emotional support, and other forms of assistance from friends in our community that have helped us get through the first few days after the fire.

• We would also like to thank the Red Cross for gift cards, medical referrals, toiletries, and other supplies to assist the members who lost their rooms in the manor.

Our residents whose bedrooms and belongings were destroyed by the fire, roof collapse, and/or flooding have written their own statement describing what they lost and how you can help them.

We have also asked for donations to cover some of our costs in dealing with the damage to the manor. Any donations above our cost to protect the manor from further damage will be divided between repair costs and any shortfall in the impacted residents’ fundraising.

We are still looking for potential buyers for the property who are aligned with our desire to repair and restore at least most of the manor. While the damage now may look severe, and it certainly is, a buyer who was already planning to put millions into renovations could still achieve glorious results on the same total budget. There is a beautiful 15,000 square foot 2.5-story Victorian home still hiding amidst the wreckage, waiting for someone to bring it back to life. We would like to lease the smaller, newer buildings to continue living here and pursuing some of our community goals, which would be guaranteed rental income for a new owner. If you trust someone to honor the historic nature of the property, and they are interested, please introduce us. Sparr intends to make some major decisions on this front within the next few weeks.

That brings us to our most immediate call for assistance. With multiple inches of rain coming this week, and further rain into the spring, we need to protect the surviving parts of the manor as soon as possible. Whether the work ends up done by us or someone else, some day the first and second floors of the building can be beautiful again, and that will be much less costly if we can get the building dried out before mold starts to spread, and the windows and walls sealed before animals make their way in.

The nature of the damage to the roof prevents us from using typical post-fire plywood and tarp solutions, commercial or otherwise. Our lack of insurance coverage for the work limits our options to safely get creative with volunteer labor.

• We have one quote from a large-scale shrink wrapping company for $135k which is beyond prohibitive at this time.

• We are looking for a fumigation company who could tarp/tent the whole building.

• We are brainstorming ways to use event tents and/or scaffolds to solve this problem.

We are open to other creative ideas or any support you can provide in solving this problem. Please don’t start cold-calling service providers without coordinating with us; we don’t want them inundated with repetitive calls.

Sparr has spent the first chunk of our remediation budget on large heavy duty tarps, some tools to replace ours that were flooded in the basement, and climbing safety harnesses to replace ours that burned up in the attic. If you’re reading this in the days after we publish it, he is probably right now in the manor attic doing his best to get tarps up before the rain returns in force.

Looking forward, once we protect the building from further water damage, we still have a long list of things to do.

• Standing burned structure needs to be demolished.

• Windows need covering then repair or replacement.

• Charred boards and plaster, charcoal, metal of various sorts, and soot dust all need removal.

• Interior water-damaged areas need drying and other remediation.

• Walls damaged by fire fighting efforts need repair.

• Eventually, a new roof will need to be constructed, probably above the second floor.

All of this takes money and time, neither of which we have in great supply. We would be grateful to hear from any professionals willing to donate any amount of effort to these needs, or even to offer generous payment timelines so that we might fix problems today with money we hope to raise in the coming weeks to months. We are open to volunteer assistance with some of these efforts, but this is dangerous work that we would not ask anyone to do who is not comfortable with that. Our email is ideas@est8ofmind.com for any leads on these issues.

Although cash and labor are most useful to us right now, there are also many items that we will need and would welcome as donations or for lending.

• Consumable

  • Food

  • Large tarps, billboard vinyl, etc

  • Lumber (2x3 to 2x10, plywood, etc)

  • Screws and nails

  • Generator fuel

  • Batteries (AAA, AA, 9V)

  • Construction safety (gloves, respirators, etc)

• Reusable

  • Rechargeable lights (flashlights, work lights, etc)

  • Fans, especially large and/or fast

  • Ladders

  • Scaffolds

  • Portable shade/rain structures

  • Elevated work safety equipment (harness, etc)

  • Construction safety equipment (hard hat, vest, glasses and goggles, etc)

  • Semi-rigid construction trash chute to replace the one we’ve made from buckets

  • Ramps, 4-30ft long, 3-4ft wide, like for a wheel chair or pallet jack or hand truck

  • Dome or tent or other structure big enough to cover the manor

  • Boom lift(s)

  • Storage bins

We don’t know what caused the fire. Investigations by local and state police and fire authorities, as well as an insurance fire investigator, are ongoing. We know it started adjacent to the second floor emergency egress landing on the south corner of the building, and the time as mentioned above. These details point to potential causes that we have ruled out with varying levels of confidence.

There are many rumors and theories circulating about the source of the fire. Here is some additional information to address some of those. We hope that the investigators can eventually shed some light on what happened.

• No fire spinning or other professional or recreational fire activities, planned or otherwise, were happening anywhere on the property that night.

• No fuel or loose combustible material was stored in the area where the fire originated.

• We have never had fire spinning inside the manor or any other buildings. We have always only hosted fire spinning outside.

• We had done no construction on the part of the house where the fire started.

• There was no energized knob & tube or cloth-insulated wire anywhere in the Manor. It was all disconnected by licensed electrical contractors we hired to replace the main electric service, main panels, and sub panels two years ago.

• The only live electrical fixtures in that area were on rigid metal conduit built in approximately the 1990s, which were inspected and confidently left in service by the same electricians and have not since been modified in any way.

• There were no fires lit in our fireplaces within at least 24 hours of the fire starting.

• We had the ballroom chimney, which passes through the fire’s origin area, serviced a few dozen uses prior.

It has been proposed that perhaps someone was smoking outside on the landing where the fire started.

• We have not been able to find evidence of anyone being on or smoking on that landing.

• We offer a designated outdoor, paved, comfortable, sheltered smoking area with ashtrays and seating, located a safe distance from our residential structures, which residents and guests regularly use for cigarette smoking.

• There were also multiple smoking areas with a subset of those amenities near enough to the source of the fire to have been extremely convenient alternatives, but far enough to be confident they were not the source of the fire.

• We have made controversial choices as an organization. We do know that we have made some enemies. We don’t know who might have been motivated to destroy our property.

• We have no evidence of anyone entering the property uninvited that evening, and no evidence of residents or guests being present where the fire began.

• We were temporarily without our own insurance on the property at the time of the fire.

• If we were interested in committing insurance fraud, we would have done it a few months earlier, with insurance that would have paid us millions for damages of this sort. We would not have chosen a time when our insurance had lapsed.

• We stood to receive much greater financial gain with the manor intact, as that would have enabled us to sell part or all of the property at a high value, which we were about to do. This fire gained us nothing, cost us everything, and destroyed our hopes of financial gain.

• We were thoroughly dedicated to ensuring no harm came to this property, as anyone who has taken the time to meet us or collaborate on this nonprofit project can confirm. These are hurtful and insulting accusations that appear to be based on the assumption that we did not have any regard for the historic value of the manor. These tasteless statements have come from people who made no previous attempts to support our ongoing preservation and restoration efforts. We hope that this statement has cleared up those suspicions.

There are very few companies that will insure a property of this sort, even fewer that will deal with individual homeowners, and we found only one after trying dozens. At the end of 2023, with our insurance renewal approaching, the insurance company raised our rates by thousands of dollars with a new $13,000 down payment due immediately, which we did not have. We could not find a replacement carrier. Faced with immediate failure if we stopped paying the mortgage, or possible loss if we stopped paying the insurance, we felt it necessary to prioritize the mortgage. In December 2023 our property insurance lapsed. See below regarding our plans to reinstate it.

When that happened, our bank secured their own insurance from a company that would not sell us insurance directly, then billed us for it. Fortunately this involved much lower payments with much more flexibility. Unfortunately, they insured only their interest in the property, not the value or replacement cost of the property or any of the buildings. Their insurance company does not deal directly with us and we will not receive any money or assistance from them for repair or other recovery efforts, let alone cash to put in our pockets.

Even if our Property Insurance had been active at the time of the fire, it would have covered only damage to the property, and would not have covered contents belonging to the residents.

Only a few of the impacted residents have renters insurance. We are finding out if that will cover some of their lost belongings, but that will be just a drop in that particular bucket. Here is another link to the fundraiser for the affected residents without insurance.

A week ago, we were on track to recover financially, reinstate our insurance, and accelerate renovations on the manor. We have a signed offer to sell a portion of the property’s forested land. That would have provided plenty of funds for those and other goals. One of the contingencies on that deal was tied to a new appraisal of the property and the needs of our mortgage bank, which will almost certainly no longer work out after the fire.

We had also received a verbal offer to sell the full property for over our asking price of $2.5 million, which we were going to pursue if the above deal fell through. This would have kept the property with local owners interested in continuing our work to restore the historic manor and estate. This also would have yielded us significant financial gain, for which we had shared plans to split among the residents and artists and other collaborators involved in this project from the beginning. This deal will also not go through because of the fire.

This is the most devastating possible time to have had a disaster, and is likely to leave some of us in financial ruin. Our best hopes to restore the property and/or ever see financial sustainability from our endeavor to build a communal artists residency project all required us to have the Manor intact and improving.

We do not condone the harassment & abuse of our residents and community members, which is presently coming from many of our neighbors.

The residents of our manor have just lost their home and most to all their possessions. Others lost many items stored there as well, including a lifetime of art or crafts or keepsakes. All the residents of Estate of Mind, even those who lived in our other buildings, have lost much of what they spent the last 1-3 years of their lives building. We were all extremely dedicated to the cause of restoring the historic manor from its neglected condition and reviving it to its former glory. This was our passion and to be set back likely to the point of failure is devastating.

There are many online and in-person accusations that we did not care about preserving this property, or that we destroyed it on purpose, or that we have no respect for the history of the town. These accusations are baseless, cruel, and border on abusive.

• The owners and residents devoted much of their lives to this cause for years.

• Our efforts are backed by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor.

• We offer historical tours of the manor and grounds and the rest of the property every week.

• We were in the process of building a free history museum inside the manor depicting its past eras and owners, telling the stories of the Whitin family, the survivors of clergy abuse, and our future plans for the property - we had been collecting artifacts for the museum displays, most of which are now destroyed.

• We had become friends with members of the Whitin Family, descendants of the town’s founders and the people who built the Manor. They had been advising and consulting with us - including our honoring their requests that we use the building’s original name of Oakhurst Manor.

• The owners have put hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money into this project, to the point of impending bankruptcy, to keep it alive and to continue the restoration efforts.

The unfounded accusations that we thoughtlessly destroyed our own property, or that we lack respect for the history of the town qualify as harassment toward the residents here. These comments are all from individuals who have never expressed interest in assisting with our efforts to restore the property over the last two and a half years. These are not volunteers or donors to the restoration project. The current interest they are expressing only while we are faced with devastation is defeating and discouraging. When things settle, we will consider taking some action against the people spreading these rumors, but our attention is mostly occupied at the moment.

If you care about a historic property or landmark in your town, don’t wait until it is severely damaged to express that concern. Reach out and find out how you can get involved and offer support. Don’t wait until something bad happens and then accuse the people who devoted their lives to the cause of maintaining and restoring the landmark of not caring about the property. If everyone who is now expressing concern had donated money or time or even shared our blog link on their social media, things probably would have turned out much better.

As to lessons we have learned, that will be the subject of multiple future posts here and elsewhere, from our community as an organization as well as from individual community leaders and members.

Despite all of this, we are still hoping to find a path forward with promise of restoring the manor to some semblance of its former glory.

That might involve…

• Successful fundraising from individual or organizational donors or some success in our pursuit of grants.

• Selling the property to someone who shows interest in the history and future of Oakhurst Manor.

• Continuing our co-living community here in the other buildings while we pick up the pieces of the manor painfully slowly, pivoting our limited renovation budget to remediation for a few months or years.

If you have leads on any assistance with any of these goals, we would welcome them. Please contact us at ideas@est8ofmind.com.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. Please continue to be patient with our response time. We hope we will have other more positive opportunities to see and talk to you all in the future.

Photos used in this article were taken by the Grafton, MA Fire Department.

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