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fire that occurred on the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue between Twelfth and Thirteenth Streets, said that it was the first from accidental causes that had occurred in the past ten years, except the one that destroyed Hereford's Brewery at the southwest corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Ninth Street. In later years, when the population became somewhat more dense and the volunteer companies more influential and rivalries sprang up in these organizations, then fires as well as false alarms became so numerous that it was difficult at times to get a response from the companies when a real alarm was sounded.

The common duty to go to the aid of those whose property might fall a victim to the calamity of fire was not only recognized but had the sanction of the corporation law. Citizens were required to keep buckets at hand at their homes which were to be used when the emergency called.

In obedience to the impulse which had the approval of the law as well as of humanity, the minister from England, Mr. Bagot, is spoken of as sharing in the common duty on such an occasion as was M. de Neuville, the minister from France, and other well-known men. It was not uncommon then and in later years to find the President of the United States sharing with his fellow citizens in this toil. The methods of fire fighting were still of the most primitive character, as the engines were not even supplied with hose which could be attached to pumps as was common in other cities of the time. As a result the more tedious process was followed of passing the water in buckets from the place of supply to the reservoir of the engine, from whence it could be forced on the burning building.

In the case of the F Street fire, however, it seems that even the engines could not be used, as the con

temporary account states that owing to the great distance, they were not brought from the scene of the Navy Yard fire to which they had been hurried from the several wards earlier in the day.

An incident of this fire had the result of identifying a place which three years before was the scene of an affair which attained unusual prominence. In fact, it may be said that the F Street tavern acquired something of a national reputation. What had transpired there was no doubt one of the causes that led to a charge to the grand jury of the District by Judge Morsell in January, 1816; inspired one of the impassioned speeches of John Randolph in the House of Representatives and gave a place to the tavern building among the engraved plates of a book that was printed in Philadelphia in the year 1817, the earliest representation of a building in this city other than one erected by the government.

Among the citizens who seized their fire buckets and hurried to the scene was Wm. P. Gardiner, a clerk in the Post Office Department, who lived in the opposite block fronting on Twelfth Street. It appears, however, from Mr. Gardiner's own account of his conduct at the fire, as he gave it in a newspaper communication, that he did not use his bucket in attempting to stay the progress of the fire, at least as far as the building occupied by Mr. Miller was concerned. In fact, he publicly declared on that occasion that he would not put his hand to a bucket to extinguish the flames in that slave bastile. He was not the only one in the crowd that denounced the place as a prison for slaves.

The occasion further furnished an opportunity for a repetition of the account of a catastrophe which occurred in the tavern some three years previous when one of a group of negroes who was detained there, waiting to be taken to the southern market to be sold, in a

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THE SOUTHWEST CORNER OF THIRTEENTH AND F STREETS NORTHWEST. (From a photograph taken in December, 1905.)

frenzy of despair leaped from an attic window in the third story to the ground below. Both the woman's arms were broken and her back was injured, but strange to say she survived the awful fall. The details of the event went the rounds in the talk of the people who stood looking on at the burning building. It was even asserted by some, who were evidently stirred by the excitement of the occasion, that a number of black people were even then chained in the upper part of the house.

Mr. Gardiner seems to have been the most outspoken in denunciation of the place and of the practices carried on there. As might be expected, what was said by the spectators was duly reported to Mr. Miller and mention of Mr. Gardiner's share in the talk was not omitted, so that when the latter went the next day to the scene of the ruins to get his fire bucket, he met Mr. Miller, who was filled with indignation by what had been reported to him of Mr. Gardiner's remarks. A violent altercation ensued which was, however, confined to words. Then both parties betook themselves to the columns of the newspapers, where the controversy was continued and the past of the tavern pretty fully brought out.*

In this way it is possible to locate with exactness the place where in the early days of December, 1815, the act of the frenzied black woman was committed, and which may properly be considered as one of the historic places in this city, so that the fire of the spring of 1819 gains an importance which it could not possibly otherwise have after the lapse of so many years. The very act, so desperate in its character, served no doubt to concentrate and to give expression to public opinion in regard to the traffic in people of color that had for some years been gradually forming and taking shape.

* City of Washington Gazette, April 30 and May 11, 1819.

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