6/22/2005 6:00:00 PM New Fair cabin damaged in fire
By JON HILLARD
Staff Reporter
Fire swept through a three-story cabin at the Neshoba County Fairgrounds on Sunday morning.
Volunteer firefighters contained the fire at the newly constructed three-story Cabin 124, owned by Tom Wallace Cox and others. No one was in the cabin at the time of the blaze.
The cabin sustained major damage. No injuries were reported and no other cabins were damaged.
Dixon fire chief Mike Tingle was one of the first to arrive on the scene and help put out the fire.
“Of course with a fire, the heat transfers, and there’s a great possibility of catching another (building) on fire,” he said. “But we were fortunate that that one had tin sides.”
Dusty Goforth was driving into the fairgrounds to discuss some construction work and was approached by a man running who said a cabin was on fire.
Goforth made the 911 call. The unidentified man was running to the caretaker’s house to get help, he said.
Flames and smoke were initially reported coming out of the third-floor windows at 11:05 a.m.
Firefighters from Dixon, Fairwood, Hope and Linwood responded, with the first firefighters arriving at the scene at 11:13 a.m.
In just the eight minutes that the fire was unattended, the third floor of the structure was heavily damaged. The second floor later received water damage when workers exhausted the flames.
Members of the Cox family arrived coming from church shortly after firefighters.
Terri Cox McCarver said the cabin had just been completed and the family planned to spend the Fourth of July weekend there.
Shirley Cox, Terri’s mother and wife of county engineer Tom Wallace Cox, was part of a family who had owned the property for 62 years.
“It was just completely totaled,” Shirley Cox said. “It was sickening—absolutely sickening.”
The cabin was insured for $35,000, not enough to cover all of the damages, she said.
There were several people on the fairgrounds at the time of the fire, but none injured.
“Another 3 or 4 minutes would have been very critical,” Tingle said. “If it had ever started falling, it would have bulged out the sides, and fire can go out the sides.”
With the buildings only separated by a few feet, any outward expansion could have set fire to a neighboring cabin, he said.
Mrs. Norman A. Johnson Jr., whose husband was president of the Fair board for over 20 years, said she had never known of a major structural fire there in more than 57 years of attendance.
“It was just smoke hovering over the square,” she said. “You could smell it everywhere.
“I looked immediately, and flames were coming out of the Cox’s house. They were pretty bad.”
Tingle added that in his 27 years with the volunteer department, he had never seen a fire at the Fairgrounds. Tingle works fulltime as the transportation director for Newton County.
The cause of the fire is still unknown, emergency management director Jeff Mayo said.
“Primarily, we thought it was going to be electrical,” he said, adding that deputy state fire marshal Pete Adcock will perform tests and issue the cause of the fire.
Mayo said the reaction time was extremely fast.
“They did an exceptional job in not only protecting the surrounding structures but putting out the fire and minimizing the damage,” he said.
The cabin belongs also to Frances Cumberland of Jackson and Kipps Webb of Southhaven.
Mrs. McCarver said: “The Tom Wallace Cox family would like to thank the numerous people who helped alert the fire departments regarding the fire at our cabin today. The four fire deparments – Dixon, Linwood, Hope, and Fairview – were very professional and without their expediate reaction to the call the entire row of cabins could have possibly been destroyed. This was a tragedy but could have been worse if our family would have been in it. Lives could have been easily lost. You can always replace buildings but not lives. Again, thank you to the many fire volunteers!”
