Massive fire destroys buildings at the Hole in the Wall Camp in Ashford

A devastating fire at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Ashford late Friday reduced to rubble the workshops where children with serious illnesses would spend summer days baking cookies and carving small race cars from wood.

But seeing the damage Saturday — the charred wood beams and piles of twisted tin roofing — camp officials expressed relief that firefighters managed to contain the blaze before it spread to the dining hall and infirmary, which both house works of art that house much of the camp’s 32-year history.

They also pledged to rebuild the destroyed “Downtown Camp,” a wood-framed building styled like a miniature, Old West city block — an homage to camp founder Paul Newman’s film classic “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

The cause of Friday’s threealarm fire has not been determined, according to Ashford Fire Marshal Richard Whitehouse, who is investigating the blaze in cooperation with state authorities. No one was at the camp when an automatic fire alarm went off just before 5 p.m. Friday. Witnesses soon began calling in reports of a huge column of smoke and flames on the campgrounds, according to fire officials.

When firefighters from several towns arrived at the camp, they found the attached Arts & Crafts, Woodshop and Camp Store buildings ablaze and flames licking at the Cooking Zone. That’s where they held the line, preventing the fire from reaching the dining hall.

In daylight Saturday, it became clear how close they came to losing the battle. Only a few inches of unscathed blue paint separated the rest of the Cooking Zone’s charred exterior from the porch of the dining hall.

That was the structure Mary Lou Shefsky thought of first when she heard about the fire Friday.

It’s in that red, shaker-style barn that the camp displays eight totem poles carved by her late father-in-law Dr. Howard “Doc” Pearson, the Yale physician who was instrumental in the development of The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp.

Pearson, the camp’s medical director from 1988 to 2005, was the first person Newman and the late writer A.E. Hotchner of Westport brought on board in 1986. He encouraged them to expand the reach of the camp to serve not only children with cancer but those with sickle cell anemia, HIV/AIDS and other serious blood diseases.