Updated at 5:05 p.m.
BRATTLEBORO — When The Boston Globe visited what it called “this quirky southern Vermont town” in 2005, it raised a glass to one particularly spirited landmark.
“To those who love a good pint of beer,” the newspaper wrote, “Brattleboro is a year-round mecca, and the object of their devotion is McNeill’s Brewery.”
Owner Ray McNeill was a bit more modest. Take this past Friday at sundown, when the musician turned beer maker offered a taste of a new brew to a worker who was trying to help him reopen his downtown business closed since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Ray pronounced it drinkable, with all the right balances, but he wasn’t as thrilled with the flavor,” friend Stuart Strothman heard from the tester.
McNeill, last seen about 6 p.m., retired to his second-floor apartment over the barroom, his drinking buddies said. Less than two hours later, smoke alerted the town fire department just across the street to a blaze that took the 62-year-old’s life, authorities confirmed Monday.
None of the stunned locals who stared incredulously at the scene over the weekend knew what ignited the Elliot Street mainstay — built 150 years ago, in a twist of fate, as a firehouse.
“An investigation determined the area of origin was on the second floor, but the cause is going to remain undetermined,” Fire Chief Leonard Howard said. “There’s no criminal intent.”
But as townspeople gathered for one last call outside the three-decade community watering hole, they collectively told a story about a cello-playing, bike-pedaling barkeep who was scheduled to flee construction delays and the coming winter by flying to Mexico this week.
“Makes this doubly tragic,” friend Gray Zabriskie said.
‘Sort of like the town melting pot’
Originally from Chattanooga, Tennessee, McNeill migrated to Bennington College in 1980 to ferment his love of music. He was bartending to pay for a master’s degree when he decided to open his Brattleboro brewery in the early 1990s.
“’I was obsessed — I wanted to make great beer,” he told the Globe. “But business was awful.”
Then crowds appeared when McNeill’s German Altbier won a gold medal at the 1995 Great American Beer Festival.
“Everyone from the construction workers outside to the attorneys down the street,” he told the local newspaper in 2003. “We’re sort of like the town melting pot.”
Brattleboro Selectboard member Jessica Gelter was a college student when she first visited McNeill’s to reunite with her old high school classmates.
“Then, when I was pregnant, I’d hang out with friends and a seltzer,” the now 37-year-old mother said as she eyed the charred space once filled with communal tables. “This was such an important cultural hub.”
Standing nearby: Alfred Hughes Jr., the glitter-sprinkled Brattleboro preschool educator who annually teaches the town how to wear a star-spangled gown in the Fourth of July parade.
“The first year I had a birthday party here — I don’t think it had ever been done — it was floor-to-ceiling packed,” said Hughes, who confirmed his age as “ageless.”
Seemingly everyone in town had their own story. The Rev. Susie Webster-Toleno, a self-described introvert more partial to cider, professed she and McNeill had similar occupations.
“We sit in solidarity with those who are grieving and celebrate with those who are rejoicing,” the minister posted on Facebook. “We share sacred stories and our own interpretations of them, we pray, and we sing — oh, how we sing! And doesn’t that all sound like what happened in McNeill’s for so very many years? Our community has lost what was a sanctuary, a truly holy place.”
‘This was a home for many of us’
McNeill knew heaven had its flip side. As his business grew, its century-and-a-half-old wooden home began to buckle from the sheer size of it all. The brewery tapped its Facebook page to chronicle a series of renovations to buttress the frame inside and out.
“The wear and tear of dumping thousands of gallons of acid, base, water and beer, combined with the weight of the 17 serving tanks (an estimated 22 tons) took their toll,” McNeill posted in February. “I honestly have no idea how long this is going to take. At any rate, provided I survive the ordeal physically, I think we will be back better than ever.”
The building’s instability prevented firefighters from entering Friday. Instead, water trucks from three states aimed up to 1,000 gallons a minute from the street before controlling the blaze at 9 p.m. and departing at 10:30 p.m.
Authorities weren’t able to reach and retrieve the fire’s sole fatality until Saturday. By then, the town deemed the building so structurally unsound it demanded immediate bulldozing.
Around noon, Renaud Brothers Construction of nearby Vernon arrived with concrete barriers and backhoes.
At 2 p.m., McNeill’s friends watched as firefighters salvaged the pub’s chairs, clock, framed art and front-door mural.
At 3 p.m., a growing crowd gasped as a seeming carnivore of a crane toppled the building’s cupola and tore into its red-clapboard shell.
By sundown, 24 hours after McNeill tasted his latest brew, the local institution had evaporated.
In a town known for debating everything from ambulance providers to zero-sort recycling, everyone stood together, silent in mourning.
“This was a home for many of us, and many different generations of us,” Strothman said. “Ray was the most generous proprietor and a remarkable man — very irascible, very direct, and very, very kind. He would give you the shirt off his back and did so many little things for so many people.”
But again, McNeill was a bit more modest.
“I’d like to point out that my bar is just that, a bar,” he told the Globe.
Those who hugged and cried in its wake over the weekend felt differently.
