GUILDERLAND — The many volunteers who fought a house fire in the wee hours of Thursday morning were still recovering on Friday.

“I’m sure everybody is still hurting today,” David Dodge, assistant chief of the Guilderland Center Fire Department, told The Enterprise on Friday.

He described the two-story wooden frame house at 300 LaGrange Lane as “pretty much a loss” and said the cause of the fire is still under investigation.

The house is owned by Brian and Deborah Fenner, according to Albany County assessment rolls. The two residents were home at the time the fire broke out, Dodge said.

“They couldn’t go out the door. They had to bail,” Dodge said, adding he had no first-hand knowledge of whether they’d jumped out a window or how they escaped.

“They were scooped away in an ambulance just before we got there,” Dodge said

The call came in a few minutes after midnight, said Dodge. “The caller told dispatch there were flames out the window.”

He went on, “We called for mutual aid.” Dodge said he was unable to name all the many departments who responded, as well as those who were on standby to cover other parts of town.

LaGrange Lane is off of narrow, rural Ostrander Road. “We couldn’t have two-way traffic,” said Dodge. LaGrange Lane itself is even narrower than Ostrander and the burning house was about a quarter-mile from Ostrander.

A bigger problem than the narrow road was the lack of water. “There were no fire hydrants,” said Dodge. “We called for tankers.”

The firefighters set up a portable pond, and tankers, one by one, emptied water into the pond. A wide yellow hose snaked from the red plastic pond down the quarter-mile driveway to the burning house.

“The house was fully engulfed when we got there,” said Dodge. Only three fire trucks could fit down LaGrange Lane; two were stationed near the house and a third was half-way down the driveway.

Many other fire trucks, lights flashing in the pitch dark, lined narrow Ostrander Road along with an emergency operations vehicle.

“Every time you needed something, you had to hoof it in,” said Dodge.

All-terrain vehicles were used to help transport gear to and from the fire scene.

“When we got there, we knocked the fire down and had it almost under control,” said Dodge. “Then we briefly ran out of water.”

“We made a couple of interior attacks,” said Dodge. “They went in as far as they could go safely … a little on the first floor and they tried a second-floor attack.”

Dodge explained that, had there been people inside the burning building, the volunteers would have pushed further. “The more there is to save, the more you’re going to risk,” he said. “There’s nothing more important than saving a life.”

The firefighters did “take out some memorables,” Dodge said, describing them as “personal effects” for the home’s residents. “The smoke just damaged everything,” he said.

The North Bethlehem department rehabilitated firefighters at the scene. “We take their pulse and give them a rest,” said North Bethlehem volunteer Paul Miller who was on the scene for six hours.

“We check our people routinely. They work hard and then they rest,” said Dodge. Sometimes, the volunteers go back to fighting the fire after a rest; other times, relief is called in, he said.

“We were on the scene about seven hours,” said Dodge, from midnight until about 7 a.m. “We’re 100-percent volunteer so most of us had to get home and get to work … You have to return to normalcy after helping a neighbor out all night long.”

He concluded that he and the Guilderland Center chief, Christopher Dvorscak, “want to thank everyone” for pitching in. “We couldn’t do it without them,” said Dodge.

Long history

Brian Fenner posted to Facebook on Tuesday that, not only had the Fenners lost their beloved property, but the town lost an historic landmark.

Fenner, who could not be reached for comment, said their house was one of the oldest in the region.

“The original LaGrange family was deeded the property by the King of England almost 300 years ago,” Fenner wrote. “The original 1,000 acres went from Guilderland High School to Albany Country Club.”

“Images of America: Guilderland, New York,” compiled and written by Alice Begley and Mary Ellen Johnson, has an 1891 photograph of the LaGrange family — “one of the oldest in this area” — in front of their farmhouse on Ostrander Road.

Myndert LaGrange stands in front of the homestead with his wife, Catherine, and their children, Viola and Schuyler. LaGrange was a breeder of Morgan horses and two of his horses are displayed, held by a man in a bowler hat. 

The late Aruther Gregg, in his book, “Old Hellebergh: Scenes From Early Guilderland,” named an earlier Myndert LaGrange in his column on the Revolutionary War Battle of the Normanskill.

Gregg describes, from an 1845 account, how, in August 1777, Lt. Col. Schermerhorn led the Schenectady militia and 40 Rhode Island troops — in all about 100 men — “to root up a Tory gathering.”

Gregg then quotes from the Aug. 10, 1777 minutes of the Schenectady Committee of Correspondence, describing how neighbors — Myndert LaGrange among them — of the captured and imprisoned Tories petitioned for pardon for the captured men.

The minutes report that the committee made a motion that Myndert LaGrange “be taken into custody on suspicion of being a disaffected Person.”

“He certainly wasn’t going to prove of much assistance in suing for pardon for his neighbors,” Gregg wrote of LaGrange.

Gregg concluded of the captured Tories, “No doubt Mynderse, Groot and Van Aernam saw in these men the makings of good patriots, and to their lasting credit, we now find in the Government Records as enlisted men of the 3rd Regiment of Militia the names of Man, Winne, Featherly, Weaver, Vrooman and even Nicolas Van Petten himself” — the very men who, as Loyalists, had fought against Schermerhorn’s patriots on Nicholas Van Patten’s property and been captured.

This is the second historic Guilderland home to burn within a month. On Sept. 4, the mid-19th-Century VanPatten homestead, at 4773 Western Turnpike in rural western Guilderland, was a total loss.