EVERETT – Jennifer Reid, a volunteer with the Museum of Snohomish County History, held up a white, hand-stitched lace dress that was soaking wet and streaked with soot.
“Some of these are 1850s, 1860s,” Reid said, referring to many of the dresses soaked during efforts to douse a fire Sunday.
Volunteers estimate as much as 30 percent of the museum’s collection, stored in the 6,000-square-foot basement of a warehouse at 2815 Baker St., was dampened or drenched by water used to extinguish the fire on the top floor of the warehouse.
The water leaked into the basement where the museum’s collection was stored.
About 10 volunteers moved cardboard boxes out of the soggy storage room on Monday and got some of the wettest items into the open air.
Volunteers laid tissue paper on the concrete floor of an adjacent room, pulled out newspapers, photos, scrapbooks, magazines, political campaign signs and other items and spread them out on the paper to dry. They scrambled to find frozen storage for the wet vintage clothing to keep the items from developing mold.
Even after working all day, volunteers had barely made a dent in moving the damaged items.
“We’ve got a tremendous amount of work,” said Peter Harvey, president of the museum’s board of trustees.
No one was injured in the Sunday afternoon fire. The 45,000-square-foot building, which has two stories and a basement, houses offices, book and woodworking companies, and furniture warehouse space in addition to the museum’s collection.
The empty warehouse space where the fire started was gutted, said Kay Kisiel, who owns the building with her husband, Dennis. Damage in the rest of the building was minimal. Kay Kisiel said Monday the couple has insurance and had not received an estimate on the damage.
The warehouse, built in 1902 and expanded in the 1950s, once included a stable and the Sound Casket Manufacturing Co.
An old booth where caskets were once painted was being removed when sparks from equipment used to cut through the booth’s screws struck paint on its siding and caught fire. The fire came in contact with old, dried lacquer and took off, Kisiel said.
“We emptied two fire extinguishers on it,” she said.
The Kisiels were removing the booth and adding a stairway on the back to improve fire safety in the building and bring it up to code, she said.
The museum had most of its collection stored in the building even before January, when it closed the doors of its public display at 1913 Hewitt Ave. because of financial problems.
Tracy Tallman, co-chairwoman of the Snohomish County Historic Preservation Commission, said she’s been working on a request to the county for financial help to get the museum reopened.
“It’s all of Everett’s history for the last 150 years,” she said, surveying the damage. “It’s tragic.”
Harvey and others felt their way through the basement with flashlights Sunday night. Firefighters pumped out much of the water and worked all night to cover items with plastic, volunteers said.
But by Monday morning, several inches of water were again standing in places on the basement floor.
“I came in at 8 o’clock this morning and it was gushing,” Harvey said.
The water was again pumped out and dehumidifiers were brought in to dry the air. Still, volunteers had not gone through most of the boxes. As of Monday afternoon, they were unsure whether the standing water had seeped into metal file cabinets where the bulk of the museum’s photo collection is kept.
The museum has no insurance for the collection, first assembled in 1954, board member Joni Smith said. The collection is the largest in the county, she said.
“It’s the history of this whole area,” she said. “This is it.”
The Museum of Snohomish County History has established a fire restoration fund at Frontier Bank. The account number is 3220064186.
For more information, call the museum’s message line at 425-259-2022.
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