More Than Books Went Up in Smoke

The victims were carried from the still-smoldering building, over the fire hoses that snaked up and down Wisconsin Avenue and across the water that sluiced through the gutter. Then they were laid to rest on a clear plastic sheet spread out on the sidewalk.

To Jerry McCoy fell the task of identifying the dead and injured -- in this case, not people, but the prints and paintings that adorned the walls in the Peabody Room of the Georgetown library, which went up in flames yesterday afternoon. That's where Jerry, the archivist, works, keeping alive the history of the city's most historic neighborhood.

"That was Mrs. Jenkins Thomas," said Jerry, 48, nodding at the portrait of a prim and proper Victorian woman, its surface flecked with water from the firefighters' hoses. "I haven't seen her husband yet, so he may be MIA."

He stopped at an oval painting in an elaborate carved frame.

"That's Francis Dodge, the wealthiest man in Georgetown in the 1800s. He built the Dodge Warehouse."

There wasn't much of Dodge left, just the top of a face floating above a torso that had been washed from the canvas.

It was too soon to know what else had survived -- which books, family journals, plat maps, photographs, clipping files.

Jerry had often done a calculation in his mind: He always felt the library was a tinderbox. If a fire came -- when a fire came -- what would he save first?

As it happened, Jerry wasn't at the library when the fire started. He was downtown, in the Washingtoniana room at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. He arrived after part of the roof had started to collapse. But firefighters had salvaged the object he would have saved: a rare, circa 1840 portrait of a slave named Yarrow Mamout by James Alexander Simpson. It sat on the sidewalk collecting helicopter seed pods from a nearby maple tree.

The Yarrow portrait -- a wrinkled, pipe-smoking man with a gray, cotton-ball beard -- is probably the most valuable item owned by the library system. One of the earliest images of a known slave, it would be worth thousands to a collector.

I asked Jerry what else we know about Yarrow, a well-known figure in Georgetown. He shrugged. "I have a folder up there that's probably four inches thick," he said. Maybe it was still safe in the library. Maybe not.

A police officer assigned to guard the hodgepodge of artifacts scattered on the sidewalk looked up at the library. "It's flaming again," he said.

Jerry continued his inventory. There were two portraits of George Peabody (1795-1869), the philanthropist who founded the library. The Peabody etching looked pretty good, but an oil painting looked like a wax figure that had been set out in the sun.

"I think he's a total loss," Jerry said, sighing.

Almost unscathed was a large painting of a man with a florid moustache and a wing collar.

"That's a two-time mayor of Georgetown," said Jerry. "He died at St. Elizabeths. He went crazy at the end of his life. It's a sad story, and I'm sorry but I just can't remember his name."

Jerry tipped the painting up to check for a label on the back, but it had washed away.

An assistant fire chief walked up and announced: "The second floor is completely compromised."

There were hand-colored maps showing Georgetown in the 1870s (soaked along the bottom) and an impressionistic painting of the Key Bridge (the canvas torn). There was a damp pastel sketch labeled "North side of P Street, between 30th and 31st streets" and a framed 1822 summons to appear in District Court. Jerry tilted the summons from side to side and water sloshed between two panes of glass, the world's thinnest aquarium.

Jerry couldn't help thinking about the things he didn't see: the map of every Union fort in Civil War Washington, the document signed by Francis Scott Key, the files on the history of every single house in Georgetown. . . . Maybe they were still inside, unharmed.

Jerry lifted up a long, narrow etching of the Sistine Chapel ceiling that he'd hung in the Peabody Room ("Nothing to do with Georgetown," he admitted; "I liked the frame") and exclaimed, "Oh, here's Mr. Jenkins Thomas. He was a saddler on High Street, which is of course Wisconsin Avenue, where we're standing now."

A woman leaned over and put a pink corsage on the sidewalk next to Yarrow Mamout.

My e-mail: kellyj@washpost.com