Olde Liberty Station goes up in flames

Smoke twisted in sickly yellow swirls from the partially collapsed roof of a Bedford landmark Friday.

Harry Leist felt helpless as he stood with his employees in the parking lot and watched the smoke and flames consume their livelihoods.

Leist, the owner of Olde Liberty StationOlde Liberty Station Restaurant, had been home doing some farming when he got a call from an employee saying the restaurant was on fire. He thought it was a small fire. He had no idea how much of the historic structure was ablaze.

“It is devastating,” he said. “I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like. This is a home for us.”

The restaurant wasn’t just a local eatery, but a part of the history of Bedford. Originally built as a passenger rail station, the 104-year-old structure was the place where the “Bedford Boys” boarded the train and left home for World War II and, eventually, the front lines of the D-Day invasion.

The fire has been ruled accidental, but it may take days to determine the exact cause. Leist said he believes it began while crews did renovation work, using a torch to strip paint down to bare wood. He thinks a spark may have gotten into the insulation and spread through the attic.

Leist, who has owned the restaurant for eight years, said he plans to rebuild.

Almost 50 people work at the restaurant at 515 Bedford Ave. It hadn’t yet opened for lunch when one of the six employees there at the time noticed smoke and flames rolling out of a vent in the dining room.

Zeph Cunningham, deputy chief of the Bedford Volunteer Fire Department, said the fire broke out on the back side of the building and spread unchecked through open attic space before any of the employees noticed.

While the fire department, located just one-tenth of a mile from the restaurant, responded in seconds, the fire had raged out of control for too long above the employees’ heads, he said. The old wood used in the construction of the building burned easily.

The first hydrant to which firefighters attached the ladder truck was pumped dry as the truck sprayed 1,300 gallons of water a minute on the blaze. That further impeded firefighting efforts, as firefighters had to search for another hydrant.

The restaurant had no sprinkler system, Cunningham said.

What wasn’t burned, Cunningham said, was damaged by smoke, heat and water. In the dining area, only some of the historic pictures and paintings and a few other items could be saved.

Mandy Nicely has worked at the restaurant for more than a year. She was inside when the manager yelled for everyone to evacuate the building.

“It is horrible,” she said. “We’re a good family. We love our boss. We love our job.”

Two members of that family were transported to the hospital, suffering from smoke inhalation. One bystander also was transported when she fell at the scene.

Penny Beard said the restaurant’s dining room was empty when the fire was discovered, and the employees were doing last-minute preparations for the usual Friday lunch crowd.

“It’s like watching your own home burn,” she said. “This is my very livelihood. I live off of this. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Bedford Police Chief Jim Day said he ate at the restaurant several times each week. It has long been home to many special functions and celebrations for the Bedford community.

The building was the last passenger rail station built in Bedford. The first was built in 1852, when Bedford was known as Liberty.

This station was built in 1905 and was moved to its present site two years later. It functioned as a train station until passenger rail was eliminated through Bedford in 1971.

Olde Liberty Station is important to the story of the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, said Shannon Brooks, the foundation’s associate for research and publications.

As a train station in the 1940s, it was the farewell site of Company A of the 116th Regiment of the Virginia National Guard, a well-known group referred to as the “Bedford Boys,” who suffered heavy casualties during the Normandy Invasion.

Brooks said the men marched through the town as a company with many gatherers present. They boarded for training and future deployment in 1941, prior to Pearl Harbor. Many of them would never return; 19 died on June 6, 1944, during the invasion.

“For a lot of these guys, it was the last time people (in Bedford) saw them,“ said Brooks. “It was a moment of a lot of pride. At that point we weren’t in war ... no one had reason to believe that what was to follow was to be this horrific outcome for this group of men.”

When visitors travel to Bedford to visit the memorial, Brooks said foundation staff members regularly recommend the station as a worthwhile stop. It definitely was one of the most popular places to eat in town, she said.

“We didn’t just lose a restaurant,“ Brooks said. “We lost a place of local history.”

- Staff reporter Justin Faulconer contributed to this report.