On July 20, 1981, 13-year-old Jillbette Fletcher’s father shook her awake around 4:30 a.m. That’s when she smelled smoke wafting in through the open windows.
The 85-foot-tall Silver King Coalition Mine Building, next door to their Park Avenue home, was engulfed in flames.
Fletcher said fear rolled through her at the sight.
“You have a, what, eight-story building on fire next to your family home that's just a two-story wooden structure,” she said. “It wasn't just like part of it was on fire. The entire building was on fire. It went up like a tinder.”
Soon sirens were sounding and the community was jumping into action. Volunteer Park City firefighters started alerting nearby residents as fire crews from Heber, Kamas and Coalville showed up to help, according to an account on the Park City Museum website.
Jillbette Fletcher said her dad told her and her mother, Peggy Fletcher, to gather up the family pets. Then they loaded into the family car along with her grandmother, Blanche Fletcher, who lived nearby.
“We drove to the top of Main Street to a friend's house,” Jillbette Fletcher said. “We could still see all of the light and the flames and the ash coming off the building, even from the top of Main Street.”
In the meantime, Jillbette Fletcher’s father and brother, Mel and Rex Fletcher, used garden hoses to wet down the front of the home. Jillbette Fletcher said her dad was a volunteer firefighter and knew the mine building couldn’t be saved.
“The type of wood was so old and so brittle and dried out,” she said. “So their immediate response was to save the surrounding homes and buildings, and that's what they did. And they're lucky that nobody died from that.”
Across the street from the Fletchers, 26-year-old Michael Watts and his family were also spraying down their family home. It’s now the High West Distillery.
Watts was living on Empire Avenue at the time and was woken by sirens and yelling. He said it took only a second to see Silver King was on fire. He then ran down the street to check on his parents, Betty and Burnis Watts.
Some believe the building burned so quickly and brightly because years of coal dust layered throughout the structure served as an accelerant.
“It was so intense and so big and so hot that you were basically scrambling to get hoses and do whatever you could to spray down adjacent buildings to try to keep them from just igniting,” Michael Watts said.
Clusters of stunned locals watched the flames from a distance, many in tears, according to the museum’s story.
Once surrounding homes were protected, firefighters turned their hoses to the Silver King building. By 6 a.m., a smoking skeleton of the lower two floors was all that remained.
Along with panic and fear, Michael Watts said, he felt a deep sense of loss.
He said the Silver King building was an iconic part of Park City — a monument to the town’s mining past. Jillbette Fletcher agreed, saying it was a symbol of the hardworking people who founded the town.
The museum story says the fire was started by three men who were squatting in the building that night. They had attended a concert and broke into the building to sleep for the night.
They allegedly started a fire to stay warm and left around 3 a.m., later testifying that they believed the fire was out.
But many Parkites didn’t believe the fire was an accident. Now in her 50s, Jillbette Fletcher said there were rumors the historic building was destroyed purposefully to allow for new development.
“It was one of the hottest nights of the year. There's no way that three guys that were drunk from a concert came down to just keep warm,” she said.
The men also had to break through a fence to get into the building and passed up closer shelter with easier access, Jillbette Fletcher said.
After a trial, the men were convicted of misdemeanor reckless burning.
Even at 71, Michael Watts said he occasionally thinks of that night. He said the building’s loss changed the dynamics of development on Lower Main Street.
KPCW’s Leslie Thatcher contributed to this report.
