New Hampton farmer recovers from Wednesday barn fire

NEW HAMPTON — Farmers, whose livelihood is dependent upon the weather and other factors beyond their control, have a way of coping with disaster. When Bill Murray considers the early-morning fire on Jan. 31, that destroyed his barn and all of the equipment he needs to make a living, he observed, “Unfortunately, I guess it was my time for this.”

Lost in the fire were seven sows, a boar and several piglets, both born and unborn.

Jill Miller understands. At 4:56 a.m. on Dec. 10, her barn on Parade Road in Laconia burned down, killing four goats, nine piglets and at least 15 chickens.

“When my barn burned down, Bill has been here every day trying to help me,” she said in a telephone interview.

Murray helped to clean up after her fire, put up shelters for the surviving animals, installed fencing to keep them enclosed, converted one of her buildings into a grain room and extended power for lights and to keep water from freezing.

“He was actually coming over the other morning and fill up some more wood for my new barn when I got a call that his barn was on fire,” Miller said.

“It was the same scenario, only bigger,” Murray said on Feb. 1, as metal was being pulled from the rubble and loaded into a container to be hauled away.

Murray had been sitting at his table, having a cup of coffee shortly before 5 a.m. on Wednesday, when the light flickered and went out. He saw a glow and looked out the window to see the barn fully engulfed in flames. The fire, which he thinks started from heat lamps, was so intense he could not get in to save any of the animals inside.

“They were all in their own pens, and two of them had little ones, and then within the next week from now, for at least another week, we’re gonna start having [additional] little ones,” he said. Since a sow can give birth to litters of 10 to 16 piglets, that was a significant number of unborn animals.

Five pigs that were in shelters outside survived the fire.

In trying to get his tractor out of the building before it burned, Murray’s sweatshirt caught fire, but he emerged without significant injury.

The New Hampton Fire Department arrived to keep the fire from spreading and the town later sent a backhoe pull out his destroyed tractor. The New Hampshire Electric Cooperative came to replace the utility pole and rewire it to restore power to his home.

Murray lost more than his barn and animals. He had a complete wood shop with tools, a box trailer with automotive mechanics’ tools, welders and metalworking equipment — “so literally I have nothing right now,” he said.

Describing himself as a jack-of-all-trades who has been farming all his life, Murray sells firewood, does carpentry work and “dirt work — the list goes on and on.”

Going forward, he said, “I’m going to be figuring out how I can get myself another tractor and, once I get that, then I’ll begin.” That includes cutting trees to turn into lumber at his mill and building a new barn.

“I built this whole thing myself; nobody came here to do this for me,” Murray said. “Everything that’s here I built out-of-pocket; same thing with that house that’s out there: I built that all by myself. I milled it all; that’s what I do.”

He had no insurance to cover the loss, but said, “I’m not a person that asks for help.”

When pressed about what people can do to help, he responded, “I honestly don’t know, to be honest, because I’ve never been in that situation. All I can do is just be taking one day at a time, like yesterday, my goal was get the power, take care of the [surviving] animals. And the next step is to get rid of this scrap metal and get the wood in a pile. I can clean it up, burn it.”

Miller said she has started a GoFundMe campaign to assist Murray at gofund.me/8c744ac9.