“It’s really sad,” Wagoner business owner heartbroken over downtown fire

WAGONER COUNTY, OKLA (KTUL) — Some historic downtown Wagoner County buildings caught fire. Multiple fire crews from 13 cities helped respond Monday afternoon.

“It’s really sad as a business owner to watch people put in time and effort and we were watching people watch their businesses burn down and it was really sad,” Madison Goodwin, owner of Madison Cakes Cafe, said.

She describes what she walked outside to.

“I came into town. I couldn’t really tell what was on fire. It was just very smokey and it’s windy today so that didn’t help and kind of just watched from the back and just watched the fire just build up and every time the wind blew the fire would get bigger,” she described.

Jarrett Hardwick with Broken Arrow Fire Department spoke on behalf of the Wagoner County Fire Chief.

He said BA got the call to help at 3:15 p.m. It happened off Cherokee and Main Streets at three buildings, one of which was vacant.

Goodwin shares what businesses have to rebuild.

“What’s on fire is an old firehouse they were trying to actually renovate and make it into a business, and it’s got really old wood in it from the 1920s and they said the moment that caught on fire the building was done. The next one was a building that was kind of like an antique shop that caught on fire. They’ve got this business called Atlis,” she said.

A nearby business, Wagoner History Museum, started moving artifacts in case the fire spread a few more businesses down.

“Loading it up as fast as we can in order to save our history,” Goodwin said.

She said this wasn’t the first time in recent years a fire destroyed part of downtown.

“The lot we’re standing in this was at one point and time a functioning business. It was apartments and business that we had and in 2017 a random fire started and knocked down this entire structure and lost that and thank God our building didn’t burn but we had another fire a couple of months ago and now we have this and it’s just it’s sad because you can’t get history back,” Goodwin said.

She’s hoping the history of fires in downtown Wagoner won’t keep repeating itself.

No one was injured.

SIGN UP FOR THE CHANNEL 8 NEWSLETTER