NTRO: Music spliced with hot comments from various interviews. Fades out to pause.

[JIM BYLER (0:50)]: First call, I showed up down here, me and Dan Bledsoe and we immediately started starting trucks and took off down there. I don’t know who come second and third because it was so bad but when I arrived it was whoo, it was bad.

[NARRATOR]: Jim Byler is the chief of the Noxon Rural Fire District. A lean, bushy-bearded man, he usually runs the buses at the local school district. But in the early morning hours of Feb. 27, 2024, he …

NTRO: Music spliced with hot comments from various interviews. Fades out to pause.

[JIM BYLER (0:50)]: First call, I showed up down here, me and Dan Bledsoe and we immediately started starting trucks and took off down there. I don’t know who come second and third because it was so bad but when I arrived it was whoo, it was bad.

[NARRATOR]: Jim Byler is the chief of the Noxon Rural Fire District. A lean, bushy-bearded man, he usually runs the buses at the local school district. But in the early morning hours of Feb. 27, 2024, he was racing from his home to downtown Noxon while radioing for backup.

The call came in about 5:45 a.m. from a motorist driving along Montana 200 on the opposite side of the Clark Fork from Noxon, an unincorporated community of about 250 people in Sanders County. Something was burning across the dark water.

[BYLER (1:19]: Somebody seen it from 200. So actually we figure, everybody figures, it was burning for a couple of hours before it was called in."

[NARRATOR]: As he drove toward town that morning, Jim paged once for mutual aid. As he came up on the Noxon Bridge, the artery connecting the community with the highway and the outside world, he saw that he needed more help.

[BYLER (4:45)]: A big ball of orange flames. It was huge. I mean the town was lit up, it was lit up. But it was only one building at that time too, that’s just from that building.”

[NARRATOR]: Before the fire, Noxon’s downtown was made up of four storefronts: The Angry Beaver General Store, the Mercantile and Cafe, Toby’s Tavern and Johnson Hardware, which was separated from the other three by Broadway Street. People around town knew of the general store as a place to grab some quick groceries and other odd items. The Mercantile and Cafe had become a popular restaurant for residents of Sanders County. And everyone knew Toby’s. The storied bar, now run by Toby’s daughter Gayle, was Noxon’s community center and history museum. If you lived in that part of the state you probably donated a dollar coin to Toby’s collection. The general store, mercantile and tavern were squeezed together on a single block, the Western style false front facades looking out on Noxon Avenue and toward the Clark Fork.

By the time Jim got into town the Angry Beaver was pretty much burned. You could see “clean through” it, he said.

While word of the fire spread through social media, like Facebook, people living in town only needed to look out their window. Kevin Johnson, who owns Johnson Hardware with his wife Laura, lives above Noxon. He remembered the strange color in the sky.

[KEVIN JOHNSON (5:22)]: Dogs woke me up. Yeah. Dogs woke us up out of bed so I looked outside, let’em out, let’em outside, looked a little odd outside just because it was an orange hue in the air and 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. We live just above town. We overlook town here. And so I looked down the way here and after I realized well its not my hardware store burning down I looked around and yelled at Laura. Said get up. We have to head to town. It's on fire.

[NARRATOR]: April Bowe, who grew up in Noxon but only moved back the summer before the blaze, thought it was a house fire. Bowe, who was manning the cash register in the trailer that the general store had relocated to since the fire, had a job in Heron at the time.

[APRIL BOWE]: So I actually live just up here so I could see it. It was actually pretty awful. At first I didn’t realize it was the store, I thought it was somebody’s house or something.

[NARRATOR]: It took just minutes for Kevin and Laura Johnson to get down to Noxon Avenue. By then it was already over for the businesses just a stone’s throw from the Johnsons’ storefront.

[JOHNSON (5:22)]: And we were down here within ten minutes of waking up. And it was pretty well, the grocery store was already in the basement burnt down. Very hot fire and shortly after that down went Toby's. They couldn’t put it out. They could have had LA fire here and it wasn’t going get put out as hot as it was by the time we got down here. And that was about the same time fire departments were responding.

[NARRATOR]: Jim Byler’s firefighters were receiving mutual aid from crews in the neighboring communities of Heron and Trout Creek. He figures they had more than a dozen fire apparatus on scene and around 30 firefighters. But by then the fire was spreading.

[BYLER (5:56)]: And we all were spraying water on all four sides of all the buildings because then it started, it hit Tobys second and it was starting to suck up through the rafters, cause the rafters outside was all wide open so it actually just sucked it right up in there.”

[NARRATOR]: By the time Noxon firefighter Tegan Summers arrived, the general store was on the verge of collapse. His father woke him up that morning, telling him to get his ass out of bed because Noxon was burning down.

[TEGAN SUMMERS (13:50)]: It was still dark outside being February, yeah no, it lit up everything. We don’t got any street lights besides maybe one or two and yeah no, by that point the front was about to cave in, there was flames about everywhere on the store and then toby’s started to burn in the middleish from the left side because thats where the store and the bar were connected.

[NARRATOR]: Kevin and Laura Johnson tried to help as much as they could without getting in the way. They pointed firefighters from the other towns to Noxon’s fire hydrants. But mostly they watched Noxon’s downtown burn down.

[JOHNSON (8:52)]: I stayed out of the way. We didn’t want to interrupt what was going on right on top of that fire there and uh so for us just looking at it, you could just see it glowing because the grocery store burnt very hot and it was gone, in the basement and you could see the smoke coming out of tobys and the restaurant. You could just see smoke billowing out of those things that indicated that it was obviously burning inside pretty hot.

[BYLER (18:16)]: 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. I mean, we pumped, idk, its in my report, but we pumped lots of water because we had this hdrant set up, we had a hydran set up down there, two hydrants in town. We were pulling hoses straight off the hydrants to the trucks and we had pumps set up on the river so we had plenty of water. But that fire was just so intense.

[NARRATOR]: The firefighters working the scene almost instinctively began salvaging what they could from inside the buildings even as the fire burned around them. Byler came across a group trying to save a safe from the flames. He lent a hand. Then told them to knock it off.

[BYLER (36:31)]: I helped with the safe, me and Corey ... because I told them they can't retrieve nothing else because they were already standing in four inches of water and you could see the flames rolling across the top and they went inside through the back and 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. Because it was already rolling across the ceiling.

[NARRATOR]: The items saved from the fire included the tip jar at the Mercantile, the safe, cash, alcohol and personal belongings hauled out of Toby’s Tavern. Tegan found himself in a room converted for storage inside the storied bar.

[SUMMERS (37:44)]: That was, originally Toby's it was like a barber and all stuff and they stopped using that. .. and they just kept it as storage and there was old pictures and just sayings from toby just put up when he was still around and we managed to grab all of that and give it to the owner and save all the alcohol from the big refrigerator they had.

[NARRATOR]: Sam Overman, another Noxon firefighter, remembered crews working to get the alcohol out of Toby’s Tavern.

[SAM OVERMAN (12:02)]: all the liquor and all the beer was saved, and all the cash. There's a little cooler at the end of Toby's bar, that was saved and there is a big diesel tank behind that and that was saved.

[NARRATOR]: There were other surprises inside the bar, too.

[SUMMERS (12:22)]: I do remember being told that there was quite a few weapons throughout there because Gayle was quite the stasher with quite about anything of her’s and I was spraying water and all the sudden I hear this boom and I'm like what is that and then the owner came up right behind me and started yelling I forgot there’s a 12 gauge in there and it just started going off one by one every other minute. I was like alright, i stepped back a couple, ten feet.

[NARRATOR]: They also pulled out the flag given to Toby, the original owner of the bar, who was an Air Force veteran. And they recovered an estimated 10,700 silver dollars. Customers had donated the coins over the years and they’d been stuck all over the tavern’s interior. Byler remembered adding one to the back of the bar in the 1970s.

What had to be the biggest save, though, was the bar itself. As the buildings burned, firefighters worried that the false fronts would collapse down on them as they hosed the structures with water. So the word went out for a logging truck.

[BYLER (43:26)]: we brought a log truck in to knock them down for the safety of the fireman because they were trying to lean out into the streets, so we put them in, put them in on the fire.

[NARRATOR]: That truck ended up pulling double duty that morning.

[SUMMERS (11:11)]: well we were just trying to get something with a boon to get a couple of valuable things out of the bar. It had a bar and they had a safe in there as well. And we finally contacted a guy with a log truck and he came down there, i think his name was erik weir, and we were able to get both the safe with the money and the bar with everything inside of it still intact and just some burns on the outside.

[NARRATOR]: Tegan remembered seeing Gail Therrian, Toby’s daughter who had run the bar since his death, watching them work. Gail, who you can still catch walking her dog around the vacant lot where the bar once stood, declined to be interviewed for this story. When I met her briefly while walking along Noxon Avenue, she simply said it was too much for her.

[SUMMERS (49:34)]: yeah once we started getting all of the like valuable important stuff out of the bar the owner came up and we were ok with it because it was her stuff and we were all right there and we all had a job and I was just helping move stuff and she started to break down and I was just trying to get that to a position where it can be managed and be put somewhere else or just, yeah we can help her and everything is still ok.

[NARRATOR]: Kevin Johnson was there as Noxon’s other business owners came down to check on their stores. It was emotional, he said.

[JOHNSON (10:28)]: We saw all of, we saw all the owners down here and you could tell it was very emotional for them. 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.

[NARRATOR]: The fire was deemed contained at 11:15 that morning, though firefighters monitored the area for several days afterward. Jim and his wife [TKTKTK] even camped out overnight. Rumors had begun spreading even as the fire burned and the word around town was that an arsonist was involved. Although the various insurance companies involved eventually had three teams sifting over the wreckage, it took them a while to get going. That gave time for suspicions to take root, Jim told me.

[BYLER (32:13)]: But it went quick. The rumors, we were still there and it was being called arson. I got cruficied because of it.

[NARRATOR]: That a cause could never be found for the fire didn’t help. When investigators showed up, they couldn’t even figure out where the fire began, Jim remembered.

It was eventually deemed undetermined. One of the reasons investigators went with that designation was that if evidence ever emerged of an arsonist, they could pursue criminal charges, Jim told me. If they called it accidental, though, they wouldn’t have that option.

But ...

[BYLER (30:39)]: It wasn’t arson, though.

[NARRATOR]: Asking around town, there are a few non-arson related theories as to why the fire started and why it eventually consumed all three buildings. There’s the age of the buildings, for one. Hell, they looked as though they might topple over in a strong wind, said Tegan. Many, including Kevin Johnson, believe the wiring played a role. The firefighters who worked the blaze tend to agree.

[BYLER (28:53)]: No way will that ever be ruled arson. They were just too old. The wiring was ancient.

[SUMMERS (28:53)]: There was copper wiring all throughout the bar ... it was all bounded up and just nasty.

[NARRATOR]: But the suspicions about arson persisted and turned into anger, which ended up being directed at the fire department. It got hot enough that Jim decided to step aside for a little while. If people wanted a villain, they could blame him, he told me. He didn’t want the department and his firefighters to catch the brunt of it.

[BYLER (57:12)]: I figured let me take all the shit leave the fire dept out of it. The board din’t like that decision but i thought it was the best.

[NARRATOR]: The town, meanwhile, was grappling with a huge loss. April Bowe remembered it as devastating.

[BOWE]: It looked pretty awful. Everything was mostly gone. There was a little bit of some building parts over there, boards and metal everywhere, community people trying to help.

Devastation. Yeah. It can’t be replaced.

[NARRATOR]: The loss of all three businesses at once was a gut punch. There was the loss of what most people considered town landmarks. But there was also the loss of, well a place to get snacks. Gone was the restaurant, perfect for dinner dates. Gone was the store, where you could grab staples on the fly. Gone was the combination bar and unofficial community center.

[BYLER (46:09)]: Tobys was nice. I mean, I never went there after I moved back here. When I was a kid i always hung out there. But like the angry beaver I was in there every day because i run the bus garage and the fire department so i was always in there buying snacks for hte guys and we had training meetings, who wants to drive? i mean it was close. It was there.

[SUMMERS]: I don’t remember ever seeing like a when Toby's was actually open throughout the day it was just you seen cars there park and open the door and you’re welcome. It was very tradition. They always have birthdays for people, all the older people have been there their whole entire life.

[BYLER]: She didn’t even have to be open and she’d cash a check for people. She'd go down and open up just to cash a check. You talk to any of the older timers around here, once twice, once a week or every two weeks there would be a handful of old timers, the originals in this area, 70s and 80s, that’s where they would go for one day, they’d get together. Now they don’t. They just sit at home. They don’t have a hangout. Unless the ridge riders, the snowmobile club, has a meeting then they meet up. That used to be at least once a week the old timers get together.

[NARRATOR]: Despite the loss, Noxon was ready to roll out the welcome mat as the seasons changed and the annual Fourth of July bash loomed. It was the height of tourist season, but travelers weren’t as plentiful as in years past. Many of the people who stopped through came to look at how the town was doing after the fire, Jim told me. So they decided to make the Independence Day celebration bigger.

[BYLER (1:02:02)]: we invited more people this year to our parade. We actually had the sheriff, we invited the sheriff this year, we invited (sam’s) brother’s fire department so we had a lot of frickin trucks. So it was pretty good bang.

[NARRATOR]: Tegan recalled it as one of the busiest he could remember.

[SUMMER (1:02:02)]: We had the same if not more traffic than we always do every year. People park all the way on the side of the road from the stores all the way up to the other side of town. ... I think it was a lot more packed just because everyone wanted to see what was going on.

[NARRATOR]: Tegan isn’t alone. Talking to people around town, everyone remembers just how much effort went into that day, and the fun that was had. Noxon’s Fourth of July celebration typically involves the parade, but also features chicken coop bingo, turtle races and live music. It is, in Kevin Johnson’s words, a traditional Fourth of July.

[JOHNSON (15:22)]: The parade was the biggest parade I've ever seen and uh that was good. We had what was it people from Noxon, Heron and Trout Creek that lined up very well so that was good to see. And then they had a live band in town ... they had a live band in town one of our local high school guys who graduated out that’s semi professional singer came back to help do a dedication for a lady who had passed away here, the larkin family so that was really good to see. And again, music and food that brings people in all the time, but it was exceptional on the fourth of july. It was really good.

[NARRATOR]: But days later, Noxon got a second blow. Inspectors working the Noxon Bridge, a more than a century old span that connects the town to the rest of Sanders County, was unsafe. Road blocks went up. Noxon was cut off.

[JOHNSON (17:13)]: We happened to be out of town again. You know being business owners we don’t get to leave that often but seems like every time we leave something happens. Literally. When the Hereford burnt down a couple of years ago we were out of town. But uh we were out of town my son called us up, he’s like dad uh they just closed the Noxon bridge. I said boy you better get on the horn and start making phone calls...