On Tuesday morning, Jan. 5, 1904, just after 3 a.m., Brunswick Police Officer J.E. Alexander fired shots into the air over downtown. It was “eight degrees below zero” and Brunswick’s grandest hotel was on fire.

Just before 3 a.m., Hotel Night Clerk Alonzo Colby started a fire in “the kitchen range” to help thaw frozen pipes. Colby then took a phone call at the front desk, and when he returned to the kitchen he found “flames roaring up a flue.”

When Postal Night Clerk George Leonard heard Officer Alexander’s shots ring out, he started ringing the town bell. After five clangs “the clapper” fell off. The bell was quickly fixed and began ringing out again. Meanwhile, Leonard summoned firefighters by engaging a new “fire whistle,” which blew “one short and two long” blasts.

The Tontine Hotel was built in 1828 and served as one of the greatest “landmarks of all Maine.” The hotel stood four stories tall, with 30 apartments, and commanded the entire corner of Maine and School streets. Among its most famous guests were, “President Franklin Pierce … [Sen.] James G. Blaine … and the poet Longfellow.”

“In the old horse and buggy days … it was quite the thing” to travel to Brunswick for “student dances or a community Ball” or just to find a “cheery welcome … and happy atmosphere” while enjoying “a sumptuous dinner” at the Tontine Hotel.

The hotel was well occupied as thick smoke from the rapidly moving blaze filled each floor and “sparks flew in a steady shower over the house of Captain George Skolfield.” Colby, now aided by Officer Alexander, rushed to evacuate the massive structure as volunteer firefighters rushed to the scene.

When firefighters arrived they found “the building doomed from the start … as flames illuminated the sky as bright as day,” and “suitcases were being flung” through the air as guests and employees were “jumping out of windows.”

Hotel guest “Lloyd Gowan … jumped from the 4th floor” to the roof of Emery “Crawford’s [livery] shed,” while guest John Berkely was forced to “fly for his life.” Regular guests “John Buckley and W.H. Jefferson … leaped from a third story window to the piazza below.” Meanwhile, “Bell Boy” Eddie St. Pierre had escaped the fourth floor unharmed.

Trapped in her room, hotel waitress Carrie Grafton soon climbed through a window onto the fourth floor roof. When firemen of “the Pejepscot hook and ladder” arrived they performed a “thrilling rescue” of Grafton, who was found “clinging to a telephone wire … her hand and arm badly burned.”

“Solon Bramhall, a fifty-five year old Camden painter and upholsterer,” working at the hotel, occupied the room next to Grafton’s. His screams of “Fire!” had alerted Grafton and others. But Solon Bramhall never escaped the fire.

Firefighters scrambled to extinguish flames which had spread to “Emery Crawford’s livery” and carriage house, located behind the hotel.

By 5 a.m., firefighters were alerted to another fire, just a block away, as spectators and victims of the Tontine fire pointed to the bright flames jutting from the chimney of Dr. Elbridge Stetson’s house on Everett Street.

Firefighters quickly divided their numbers and rushed to extinguish the blaze and save the home. Then, these frozen and weary firefighters scrambled yet again, as “another alarm was rung in.”

This time, firefighters raced to “Eben Holmes’ … Star Café … on Maine Street,” where another chimney fire threatened to torch all of Brunswick’s downtown. Despite their “hoses being frozen to the ground,” firefighters — suffering from frostbite to their hands and fingers — were still able to extinguish the blaze “without difficulty.”

By mid-morning, while as many as 50 victims of the fire were being treated for exposure, smoke inhalation and burns, the charred body of Solon Bramhall was carefully picked out of the frozen and water soaked ruins of the hotel. And this blaze wasn’t the first fire to ravage the grand Tontine Hotel.

On Jan. 3, 1898, exactly six years earlier, a fire “raged through the ell” of the Tontine Hotel, burning “through the roof.” The hotel was quickly “renovated from ridge pole to basement” by an “army of workmen” and reopened less than two months later.

But this fire in 1904 had been more devastating, and the hotel would not be rebuilt. In the coming years, the site would host the “Past Time Theater, an auto dealership, a State Agency Liquor Store, St. Charles Federal Credit Union” and now Bull Moose Music.

Today, “the Tontine Mall has been a local fixture since 1922” and serves as a vague reminder of the “once great and famous hotel” known as the grand “landmark of Maine.” And although this deadly fire is largely forgotten, we remember this historic event in our epic Stories from Maine.

Lori-Suzanne Dell has authored five books, and publishes the Stories From Maine Facebook page and weekly podcast on Spotify and YouTube.