Marshfield has always been a coastal hot spot, but never like in 1941.
1941 was the year that Hell came to Marshfield in the form of the Great Brant Rock Fire.
April 21 of 1941 was a windy day during what had been a very dry spring. Nobody knows what started the fire, although 200 had been reported across the state in previous days. My guesses would be cooking fire, pitched Lucky, pre-WW2 wiring... but I don't think anyone knows. This was before Pearl Harbor, so it most likely wasn't the Nazis or the Japanese.
Historian John Horrigan, who lived in the area at the time, says leading causes were a cigarette or an intentionally set fire (perhaps to remove brush) on Musket Avenue.
The fire started at the corner of Ocean Street and Plymouth Avenue in Fieldston. High winds sent it greedily eastward across the tall marsh grass, and it was soon burning a few hundred acres.
Then it hit the houses, and it was Inferno Time.
If you think that the cottages there are close together today, know that zoning changes made after this fire doubled the minimum lot sizes from 5000 square feet to 10000.
This is the heart of the Irish Riviera (Fieldston and Quincy's Squantum neighborhood are in a dead heat for America's Most Irish Neighborhood), and (sub)urban planners hadn't, to quote PJ O'Rourke, "figured out that you can't stack poor people who drink."
The fire jumped house to house. These were all wooden cottages, and many were burned flat in 10 minutes. It leveled great sections of Ocean Bluff and Fieldston as it roared towards Brant Rock.
Flames were 10 stories high. The fire could be seen from Provincetown and, amazingly, Nantucket. From a vantage point of Marshfield Hills, it looked like how Hell must look from Satan's throne.
Gamblers should know that this fire destroyed the Ocean Bluffs Casino, which was one of Babe Ruth's favorite spots. Witnesses said that the casks of booze in the casino exploded.
As the fire neared Brant Rock, a heartbreaking decision was made. They would dynamite every house between Samoset Street and the Brant Rock Chapel. This would create a firebreak to starve the blaze. Explosives were placed, and...
The wind then shifted from west to east. This blew the fire back on itself, and since it had burned Ocean Bluff and Fieldston to the sand, there was no more fuel for the fire. It burned out shortly after the wind shift.
Around 500 cottages burned. No lives were lost, perhaps due to the seasonal occupation of these cottages. The fire department evacuated 70 families from the area ahead of the inferno.
Post-fire, much of the area looked like those pictures you see of Hiroshima after we am become deathed them in 1945.
The event is somewhat forgotten. I stumbled across it looking for something else.
Ironically, the fire never made it to Brant Rock. How it got named what it did is also lost to History.
Pictures are from the Patriot Ledger, the Duxbury Fire Department and Other.
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