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  • The charred remains of an historic barn just southeast of Garber. Officials believe the fire that destroyed the building was intentionally set. (Staff Photo by SHAWN YORKS)

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February 9, 2010

Fire destroys piece of Garber’s history

By Joe Malan, Staff Writer Enid News and Eagle

GARBER — In the early 1900s, folks traveling to Perry would stop for rest at a barn near the intersection of two roads in Garber.

The two-story brown barn, which was accompanied by a small house nearby, stood in the middle of the town until the town moved north.

The barn itself stood until Sunday, when it was burned to the ground by either by accident or arson.

Regardless of the cause of the fire, Pauline Mariner Lowe, 73, is upset.

She said she grew up on that farm from the age of 4 all the way up to when she was in high school.

“That’s my childhood farm,” she said.

The barn was located approximately one mile south and one mile east of Garber, near the intersection of E-410 and N-3050. It was accompanied by an aging red brick silo, which still stands on the southwest part of the plot.

All that remained of the barn Sunday was a pile of twisted metal, wire and burnt wood.

About two feet in every direction around the barn was a section of charred, blackened grass.

Even though 48-year-old Larry Lowe didn’t grow up on the property himself, he still was dismayed by the fire.

“The whole red barn was kind of special, as old as it was,” Lowe said. “Even my daughter took her senior pictures there.”

The barn, which was approximately 40 feet wide, 60 feet long and two stories wide, had three stalls for horses on the inside west end of the structure, said Joe Mariner, 79, brother of Pauline Mariner Lowe.

Mariner said hay bales were stored in the upper section of the barn.

Mariner said he doesn’t know if the people passing through actually stayed in the barn, or if they stayed in the accompanying house.

It was built in 1892, before towns around the area were established in the Cherokee Strip Land Run.



Looking for answers



On Tuesday, Lowe drove out to the property and examined the remains of the old barn once more.

As he looked through bits and pieces of what was left, Lowe said he already had sifted through some of the rubble to see if he could find the cause of the fire, but he hasn’t found anything.

He’s also asked a few kids at Garber High School to keep their ears open for anything that might lead them to the arsonist, if there is one.

Lowe thinks the other possible cause could have been embers traveling from a nearby fireplace and latching onto the barn and causing it to burst into flames.

So what was the cause of the fire?

Lowe doesn’t know.

“If kids had lit it, they would have lit it during the middle of the night,” he said.

The fire, he said, began a little before 1 p.m. Sunday.

“If it was druggies,” he said, “there should have been some drug paraphernalia still in there. There wasn’t.”

Lowe did notice a pair of tire tracks leading into and out of the property. A strip of burnt wire lay on top of the tracks, so Lowe thinks whoever did it drove onto the property then back out while the fire began burning.

Mariner, meanwhile, hopes the arsonists, if they exist, are caught soon.

“I hope somebody gets a lead on it and (the arsonists are) prosecuted,” he said. “It’s just the damn principle of it. There’s no sense in people burning someone’s property down.”

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