From the ashes: The day Noxon burnt down

Jim Byler can’t remember off the top of his head when the first call came in.  

It was early, though. Before the wiry, bushy-bearded chief of the Noxon Rural Fire District usually headed out for his day job running buses for the local school district. 

It came from a motorist driving Montana 200 who spotted the fire burning in Noxon from across the dark water of the Clark Fork River in the cold pre-dawn of Feb. 27. 

Byler, who lives outside of Noxon, requested mutual aid as his vehicle leapt from the dirt road onto the paved state highway that led to town. Coming to the Noxon Bridge, Byler contacted a third department for help; he could see the flames from the far side of the river. 

“It was huge,” said the gravelly voiced Byler while sitting at a collapsable table in the rural district’s fire hall last September. “I mean, the town was lit up — it was lit up. But it was only one building at that time, too.” 

The fire that eventually consumed three of Noxon’s four downtown businesses began sometime before 5:45 a.m. in the Angry Beaver General Store, a building designed in the western false front style with an awning stretching out toward Noxon Avenue and banks of the Clark Fork beyond. Toby’s Tavern, a more than 100-year-old building that served as part watering hole, part community center and part museum, bordered the store on one side. The Mercantile and Cafe, a well-liked restaurant, hemmed it in on the other. 

As Byler arrived at the fire hall, just down the street from the trio of storefronts, “the whole town was orange,” he said.  

Tegan Summers, who put his arrival in town at about 6:20 a.m., remembered the flames illuminating the community of about 255 people and only a couple of streetlights. 

“It was so bright you could see the color of the smoke,” Summers said. 

A firefighter for the rural district, Summers woke up to news of the blaze. 

“I had school that day, but my dad woke me up around 5:45 a.m. [and said] ‘Get your ass up, there is a fire up in Noxon. It’s burning down,’” Summers recalled.  

By then, the front of the Angry Beaver looked ready to collapse in on itself and the blaze had spread to Toby’s Tavern.  

Byler believes the fire got sucked up through the adjacent bar’s rafters. There was only a roughly three-foot alley between the two buildings, he said.  

Aided by crews from Heron and Trout Creek, Noxon’s firefighters targeted the sides of the buildings with hoses. It was all you could do, Summers said.  

“I think that one of the few thoughts that was going through my head was, ‘Well the store is on fire and everything else is going to catch on fire,’” he said. “I was just kind waiting for that to happen.” 

Byler remembered breaking one of the bar’s front windows, putting water inside as the fire dropped down from the attic. Another team forced their way into the Mercantile and Cafe, but to no avail.  

“I think the only thing that could have maybe helped save it is if a helicopter was here at the same time we were, but it would have blew the buildings out anyways,” he said.  

IN HIS home above town, Kevin Johnson noted the tinge of orange in the dark sky. His dogs had awoken him that morning and though tired — he had returned from a trip out of town at 3:30 a.m. — Johnson got up to let them out.  

“… I thought, man, this is a funny sunrise, and when the fog finally cleared, I realized it wasn’t a sunrise it was actually fire,” he said. 

Johnson, who owns the eponymous hardware store one block over from Toby’s Tavern with his wife, Laura, sought to confirm the shop was still standing. 

“I looked down the way here and after I realized, well it’s not my hardware store burning down, I looked around and yelled at Laura,” Johnson recalled. “Said, ‘Get up. We have to head to town. It’s on fire.’” 

April Dawes, who moved back home to Noxon in August 2023, also remembered the glow in the sky that morning.  

“I could see the town burning,” she said, thinking back while watching over the register in the trailer that went up as a temporary home for the Angry Beaver in the wake of the fire. 

Dawes thought it was a house fire at the time. The extent of it wasn’t clear until she left for work at a previous job in Heron a few hours later, at about 7 a.m. 

“It looked pretty awful. Everything was mostly gone,” Dawes said. “There was a little bit of some building parts over there, boards and metal everywhere, and community people trying to help.” 

Johnson remembered he and Laura helping to point out hydrants to the out-of-town firefighters after the anxious drive to Noxon Avenue. The couple stayed nearby to offer what aid they could, but mostly they kept out of the way.  

By then the Angry Beaver had burned down into the basement and Toby’s Tavern was following right behind. 

Fire officials had closed off the roads around the businesses while they worked. Chuckling for a moment, Johnson recalled it being a slow business day at the hardware store.  

His laughter faded away as quickly as it came. His voice grew softer. 

“They had town blocked off for quite a while. But town was gone,” he said. 

EFFORTS TO save mementos began while the buildings burned. Byler came across a group trying to haul a safe out of the Mercantile and Cafe, standing in 4 inches of water while flames rolled across the ceiling.  

“… I found out they were back there so I went back and told them they had to leave, but they had the safe almost out so I helped them get the safe out and I said, ‘You can’t go no more. That’s it,’” he remembered.  

Someone salvaged the tip jar at the Mercantile and Cafe for the owners. They also hauled out a flag given to Toby, an Air Force veteran, who bought the bar in the late 1960s. Summers remembered finding a storage room full of paperwork and memorabilia and grabbing anything that looked important. 

The tavern’s bar was saved by a logging truck, brought in to help fight the fire. Another member of the rural fire district, Samuel Overman remembered the crews saving the liquor, beer and cash from Toby’s.  

They also recovered around $10,700 in Susan B. Anthony dollar coins from the wreckage of the tavern. Patrons had, for years, added to Toby’s collection, along with bills of varying denominations, photos and mounts. Byler contributed a dollar coin himself back in the 1970s.  

It was a museum to the land and its people. And Toby’s daughter, Gail Therrian, was its sole docent. 

“Just point to something on the wall and she could tell when and where and how and why it’s up there,” Summers said.  

He remembered Therrian, who declined to be interviewed for this series, approaching them as they began to haul items out of the blaze. She broke down, he recalled.  

“But there was a lot of people there to comfort her, a lot of her family, friends and people that go to the bar on a daily basis,” Summers said. “They were there for [her].”   

Therrian was joined by the owners of the Mercantile and Cafe and Angry Beaver. 

“We saw all the owners down here and you could tell it was very emotional for them,” Johnson recalled. 

“And for us. We knew it was changing. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to look down the road and see that things were going to be different,” he added.  

THE BLAZE was deemed contained about 11:15 a.m. But a new firestorm was whipping up.  

The first accusations of arson came with daybreak by Byler’s recollection. Several of the buildings had cameras and some people, including one of the owners, believed they could see an individual throw an object in through a window in one of the storefronts.  

When Byler looked at the images, he saw footage of smoke. And he knew that none of the windows were broken when he arrived at the fire.  

“But once someone gets something in their head, they see things,” Byler said. “But it went quick, the rumors. We were still there and it was being called arson.” 

Investigators, though, were unable to find a cause for the fire, eventually putting it down as undetermined.  

The rumors persisted, fanned in Byler’s mind by social media and a series of town meetings held in the fire’s wake. There were other accelerants at play, though.  

The Hereford Bar and Grille, a landmark not too far down Montana 200 from Noxon, had burnt down twice in recent years, the second time just the month prior. Authorities never found a cause for either blaze.  

There was also a video circulating on Facebook purportedly taken by a couple fired from jobs at local businesses hit by fire. The uploaded footage showed them coming up on the Hereford as it burned, Byler said. It played into people’s suspicions.  

And then there were the dueling teams of investigators dispatched by the various insurance companies involved in the fire in Noxon, he said. Three teams picked over the buildings’ charred carcasses, but not until after a lengthy delay.  

Eventually, blame began to fall on the firefighters. It got hot enough for Byler to temporarily step aside, handing the reins off to Overman.  

“I figured let me take all the shit, leave the fire department out of it,” Byler said months later.  

Overman, a soft-spoken, bespectacled man, said he and his fellow firefighters asked their critics to join the volunteer department.  

“All these guys are talking, [seem to] know so much about fighting fires, we invited them to join,” he said. “Where are they? Not a single one joined the fire department.” 

Just how bad the acrimony became depends on who around Noxon is fielding the question. Doug Horner, a local builder and member of the ambulance service, said rumors of an arsonist put people on edge. 

“That got everybody excited,” he said. “Who is doing this? What’s next? A lot of people, especially those not familiar with firefighting, were really upset.” 

He could understand how they saw it, to a degree. The fire began in one building — why hadn’t the firefighters stopped it there? But that doesn’t take into account the challenges responding crews faced. Horner pointed to Toby’s tin roof as an example. It got hot enough to burn the wood underneath, he said.  

“They felt that if we had good firefighters, they would have knocked down that building and saved the other ones,” Horner said.  

Johnson, though, pushed back on the perception that the fire strained relations. There were rumors of an arsonist, but that never made sense to him. It didn’t appear to have much pull with the investigators either, he said. 

Johnson has a simpler explanation. The buildings were old “with wires that matched,” he said.  

“I think in my heart of hearts it was probably old wiring that fizzled somewhere,” Johnson surmised.  

DESPITE, OR perhaps because of, the fire, Noxon saw a bigger turnout than usual for its annual Fourth of July celebration, the height of the town’s social calendar.  

“Even the people that have moved away have come back to Noxon [for the Fourth],” Horner said. “How many other Fourth of Julys … have turtle races and chicken coop bingo?” 

Byler remembered that the community redoubled its efforts to get people involved in  its parade, including the Sanders County Sheriff’s Office and Heron Rural Fire District. 

“So we had a lot of frickin’ trucks,” Byler said. “It was pretty good bang.” 

Summers remembered parked cars lining the roads downtown.  

“We had the same, if not more, traffic than we always do every year,” Summers recalled. “I think it was a lot more packed just because everyone wanted to see what was going on.” 

Visitors from nearby towns, including Trout Creek and Heron, mingled with locals, remembered Johnson. The parade was the biggest he could recall, and it was followed by live music that stretched into the evening.  

“Music and food — that brings people in all the time, but it was exceptional on the Fourth of July. It was really good,” he said.   

But just days later, on July 12, Noxon took another blow, the loss of its main artery.  

Out of town again, Johnson got a phone call from one of his sons.  

“He’s like, ‘Dad they just closed the Noxon Bridge,’” Johnson remembered. “I said, ‘Boy you better get on the horn and start making phone calls.”