26. Harry F. Byrd, III

Harry Byrd making remarks during Powhatan’s groundbreaking ceremony after the fire.

Harry Byrd, III

It was junior English and my class was studying non-fiction writing. The day’s lesson was fascinating: a letter, full of local color and colonial daily life written by Virginian Colonel William Byrd. This appealed immediately to my sensibilities of my beloved birthplace far away from suburban Washington, the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, generational home of my family, an area suffused with the story and lives of the Byrd family. We read and discussed the letter and were tasked that evening with writing a diary entry about our ‘typical’ day as if we were the Colonel. Considering my frequent and in-depth visits to Colonial Williamsburg and my natal connection to Virginia, putting myself in Colonel Byrd’s shoes for a day was incredibly easy.

Some months later I received word that my teacher had submitted my assignment to the Prince George’s County-wide literary magazine, and it had been accepted. So there I was being recognized over the school public address system by none other than Mr. Michael J. Hernick, principal of Oxon Hill Senior High School. All I could think about was

the capriciousness of fame because the ‘diary entry’ had been dashed off and was grounded in a lifetime of familiarity with ‘Virginiana.’ Really good writing, to my high school way of thinking, was based on rigor, planning, and hard work. My sense of worth at that time did not include the value of ordinary life experience or life interests – or of writing what you know.

More than a half century later I was sitting across from Colonel William Byrd’s direct descendant, Harry F. Byrd, III. The subject of my award so many decades before never came up. We were talking about a traumatic event with much more impact on our destinies: the Great Fire of February, 1988, which took the Old Building of Powhatan and razed it completely in just under two hours. Harry had been then president of the Board of Trustees, and I was a full-time teacher there and staff member living nearest to the school. We were both there.

Harry had learned of the fire around 5:30 am, from a call by then-Head Billy Peebles. I had learned about the fire at 5:43 when the phone next to my head rang, a call placed to me by a friend known for his sometimes-tasteless practical jokes. “Dick, Powhatan is on fire.” Just as I began pitching in on him for the utter inappropriateness of his ‘joke,’ he interrupted by saying, “It’s over the scanner.” His tone convinced me.

I roared over to the school, mere tenths of a mile away, and could have been guided by the boiling, fiery tower of smoke struggling to gain definition in the dawn. I pulled up to a maze of hoses and firetrucks, to Philip Myer, one of our own alums, leading the firefighters, and Billy Peebles, cheeks already tear-stained, moving toward me. Flames licked out of the ground floor windows. The upper stories were intact but chuffing smoke in syncopated bursts through newly-exploded windows. I was standing next to Paula Myer. Billy said, “Dick and Paula, I need you to go home and call all of the trustees and tell them what is happening.” We left to perform our saddest of tasks.

Harry recalls standing with a growing number of friends and trustees, trying to come up with anything they could do to help. They realized that they needed to drag hoses down to Page Brook to get water for the pumpers, but the supply was wholly inadequate. The full firefighting response awaited the tankers’ arrival. He characterized

the efforts of the many local companies which responded to the call as “their finest hour.”

Returning to the school and cresting a small ridge which brought Powhatan into view, I saw a vast pillar of flame burst through the roof as if hell itself was vomiting, the violence of the updraft carrying a momentary wreckage of building detritus with it. That instant remains one of the compelling visions of my life.

The swelling crowd watched the firefighters fling torrents of water into the conflagration. For its effect, it might as well have been gasoline. Feral cats ran in panic from the building only to turn and run back in when they saw the crowd, agonizing to save them. Two survived. One too badly burnt to be saved. The other was taken to the vet’s to be euthanized only to survive and become the pet of the Willey family. When I told Harry about the cat, he laughed and shook his head because the Willeys had found out the cat, aptly named Cinderella, was pregnant and had to pay for its neutering before they got it home. He chuckled, “Dick, no good deed goes unpunished.”

While the firefighters moved their attention to saving Lindsey Library and the Farland House, which had just been newly vinyl-sided, the Old Building sank to a pit of ashes and embers, presided over by the solitary chimney, standing like a Sherman’s toothpick. It was before 7:30 am. The fire had taken just under two hours to do its work.

In that time the school had lost its classrooms for the fourth and fifth grades, its art studio and music room, its kindergarten, locker rooms, its foreign language classroom, science lab, business office, main office, the headmaster’s office, all of its records, and the defining structure of its identity.

Our insurance agent Jerry Partlow had arrived and stayed the entire day. Beverly Edwards, then Tyson, manned the auditorium kitchen serving coffee and doughnuts the entire time. Neighbor Walt Robbins, who owned a large construction company, showed up at 8:00 am and offered his phalanx of heavy assets, “to start the cleanup.” Byrd cautioned Robbins, “We can’t begin anything until the Fire Marshall determines the cause of the fire.” He would do so the next day and trace the fire to a faulty space heater which had been in Peebles’ office. The

trustees met that day, among them Richard Farland, John Willey, Tom Gilpin, John Tyson, and the inestimable Phil Coffey. Joined by Peebles and Franny Crawford, the trustees, under Harry Byrd’s leadership, began planning Powhatan’s resurrection. The phoenix itself could have hardly risen faster.

Byrd himself arranged with Kathy Perry of Perry Engineering for a fleet of dump trucks. Kenneth Stiles arranged to keep the Frederick County landfill open over the weekend. And using Robbins’ loader the entire ashy remains were hauled away, including the chimney, which they ultimately pulled down with a chain. Phil Coffey arranged for the acquisition of mobile classrooms which would arrive within weeks, and everyone worked together relocating classrooms into the library and downstairs into the auditorium for the interim. One of the highlights of the cleanup was the discovery of the fireproof safe from the business office containing all of the school’s financial records and payroll accounts. According to Helga Goodyear, our then Business Officer, when they opened the safe there was only soot. Phil Coffey met personally with each staff member and wrote us paychecks. He asked me, “Dick, what do you make?” Without a blink that’s what he made the check for.

The fire had started on a Thursday and school reopened the next Tuesday.

The board, the staff, the entire community both inside and out swung into action. The fire had created a sense of singular purpose within the community. A planned renovation and expansion was enlarged and approved by the board the same week the stock market rocketed down on one of its more notable corrections. One of the trustees said, “I can’t vote for expansion. I’ve just lost one-third of my net worth.” But he did. As Harry Byrd put it, “In a time of crisis you do what you have to do. The fire brought the community together.” With Partlow securing the insurance settlement, which Byrd characterized as generous, and an active capital campaign – with trustees like Byrd manning the phone banks, Powhatan raised $3.5 million dollars. In eighteen months, the Old Building was replaced with two academic wings, a new administrative building, and one of the largest elementary gymnasiums in the state of Virginia. Byrd concluded, “The aftermath

of the fire was one of the best times in the history of the school. We made great friends and created an enduring rapport.”

Harry insisted that most of the energy and impetus for recovery was supplied by Billy Peebles, Powhatan’s legendary Head of School. Billy had always been known for his prodigious efforts: If there was anything he could do to advance the school – any task, any contact made, any path explored, any call completed, any opinion needing to be considered – Billy did it. Now that the need was so great and the goals of recovery so clear, Peebles, in a blazing display of intent and personal leadership (Billy always worked twice as hard as the hardest-working staff member), devoted himself to the task of rebuilding Powhatan. The man and the hour had met.

We ended the interview chatting about his and wife Barbara’s four kids: Harry, now a dad with three kids of his own; Gretchen, a lawyer in Richmond; John, a Capitol Hill lobbyist, who had just won the MVP award in the annual soccer game between members of Congress and lobbyists, and Immy, former Powhatan instructional assistant and new mother. I wanted to bring them up so that I could tell Harry myself how much we had valued them as students in our school and as exemplars of citizenship and good manners.

Harry Byrd led Powhatan’s Board through its most critical hour. He received not a nickel for his vision and labor and left our region with the legacy of a Powhatan recovered and resurgent. Knowing him and the history of his family makes it readily apparent why Americans still read his ancestors’ letters and study their accomplishments. Fate had placed him at the uncertain door of crisis, and to all of our benefits, he opened it.