The owner of Carpenter's Steak House, a landmark Hugo restaurant destroyed in a weekend fire, said Monday she might build a new restaurant but was more urgently concerned with the welfare of her 18 employees.
"It's a very sad loss and I'm concerned about my employees and the hardship for them, and the memories of all the wonderful people who came through Carpenter's," said Catherine Anderson, who owned the building on Hwy. 61 for 44 years. "It's been there for so many years and you'd think it would stay forever."
The two-story 1891 building caught fire Sunday morning and took more than eight hours to extinguish, said Fire Chief Jim Compton. He said Monday that he considered it a total loss and doubted anything could be salvaged.
A report on the fire's cause should be available from a state fire marshal sometime next week, Compton said.
Anderson and her son Mike, who had opened and closed Carpenter's for years, have planned for at least three years to build a new restaurant about a block east of the current building on the shore of Egg Lake. Catherine Anderson said she would wait until after a Wednesday meeting with an insurance adjuster before deciding whether to move forward with that plan.
Even though the family might have razed the old building eventually, it was full of business records and photographs dating to when the establishment opened as a general store 118 years ago, Catherine Anderson said. The building had pressed-tin ceilings, and the bar and back bar had come from the Schmitt Brewing Co. in 1936, she said.
Anderson said she was told the fire might have started on the second floor where she had an office. Carpenter's had a few minor fires over the years, including one in the kitchen, another that a customer started in a restroom, and one from a lightning strike, she said.
Sunday's fire, she said, pinched the livelihood of people who had worked there for years, including a second son, Ryan, who was the dishwasher for the noon lunch.
