Great Barrington — A fire late Sunday afternoon left the former Searles School on Bridge Street with relatively minor damage.
After receiving a call reporting smoke at the site, the Great Barrington Fire Department arrived on the scene just after 5 p.m. Sunday. The call brought an automatic request for mutual aid from Sheffield, Monterey, and Egremont.
All mutual aid requests were canceled, with the exception of Sheffield, which stood by the Great Barrington fire station, Great Barrington Fire Chief Charlie Burger said in an Edge interview.
Two engines, a ladder truck and a rescue truck were deployed from the State Road firehouse. They left the Searles building shortly after the fire was extinguished, but Burger and police were on scene until 8 p.m. Southern Berkshire Ambulance and the Great Barrington Firefighter’s Support Group assisted on scene.
The fire was confined to a single room on the second floor of the annex to the rear of the main building. The contents of the room were burned and, if firefighters had not arrived quickly, it might have spread, Burger said.
“The fire could have spread but most of the construction in the rear part is concrete and steel, which limits the amount of spread through the structure itself,” Burger said.
The contents burning in the room were very hot. If left unattended, the fire would have eventually caused the steel to weaken and the roof to cave in. Burger said there was no one inside the building when first responders arrived and no firefighters were injured in putting down the blaze. Southern Berkshire Ambulance and the Great Barrington Firefighter’s Support Group assisted on scene.
Burger declined to say whether he considers the fire to be suspicious, but he did add that his department, the state Fire Marshal’s Office, and the Great Barrington Police Department will be conducting a joint investigation.
The abandoned complex consists of three structures: the historic main building; the annex to the rear and the gymnasium. An adjacent building that used to house the Bryant School was restored by Jane Iredale Mineral Cosmetics as the company’s world headquarters in 2010.
The former school was purchased by a corporation owned by Chrystal Mahida, whose husband Vijay is a prominent hotelier in Berkshire County. The Mahidas obtained a special permit in 2016 to convert the school into a boutique hotel, but the project has been stalled indefinitely. The property has since proved to be a magnet for vandals who have broken many windows and scrawled graffiti on the exterior.
Searles High School was built in 1898 and became a middle school when the Berkshire Hills Regional School District was formed in 1968, at which time Great Barrington began sending its students to Monument Mountain Regional High School. Searles Middle School closed permanently in 2005 when Berkshire Hills opened regional elementary and middle schools on Monument Valley Road adjacent to the high school.
