To the Editor,
I often find something interesting in your column "WHAT WAS HAPPENING".
"A grass fire that ignited a hay pile near the Beach Club on the Smith property called the department out Wednesday afternoon at 2:12."
I was 12 years old at the time and was working in a pond I had constructed nearby. I suddenly noticed flames erupting from where the windmill used to be supplying the Masconomo House (Hotel) with water. I also saw two small boys running back to the Beach Club.
There was speculation that they were playing with matches but also, later, that it might have been spontaneous combustion. We had been piling hay there from a cut in either late June or early July. That may have given the accumulated rotting hay enough time to generate adequate heat. I forget who the boys were, but that got them "off the hook."
I put Hotel in parentheses because there was another Masconomo House built in 1856 by Captain Robert Bennet Forbes on what later became Boardman Avenue. He was the founder of what became the "short tail" branch of the Forbes family, having made his money in the China Trade.
George P. Smith
Manchester
