Otterbein College was, in a manner of speaking, born in fire. Her history shows that not too long after its erection the Main Building was destroyed by fire. It was at that time that Westerville just barely avoided losing Otterbein to Dayton, Ohio, which was the headquarters of the United Brethern Church.
Within my recollection there have been two major fires at Otterbein: First, the top structure of the Science Building and, second, Cochran Hall.
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The tar made the fire particularly difficult to extinguish. Westerville's ladder wagon would position itself on one side of the building, and as they sprayed water the fire would simply move to the other side. It took the assistance of the Worthington ladder wagon so that the fire could be attacked from both sides before it could be put out.
As soon as the fire was out, since there really wasn't structural damage to the main part of the building, persons like me with offices in the building were allowed in to try to recover what we could. There was no actual burning below the roof, and little smoke damage. However, when I went in after the fire had been out for a while the stairs still looked like a mountain stream with water tumbling down the rapids.
I was lucky; very little of my papers and books were damaged. Many were less fortunate. Tom Tegenkamp (of Life Science) and Norman Chaney (of English) had offices in the roof structure. I understand that Tom lost a lot of research records and Norm lost part of his dissertation that he had been working on.
The Planetarium was repairable and remains to this day. The observatory, which had housed a 16 inch telescope, was eventually replaced with a storage shed which held modern small telescopes with approximately the resolving power of the earlier one.
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In the spring of 1976 Otterbein had what was probably the worst fire since the burning of Old Main. Cochran Hall, a women's dormitory, went up in flames. Faulty wiring in the lounge was suspected. Again, people were fortunate; It was mid-morning and most people were out of the building. A few women had to escape down the stairs, and one had to be rescued from a window by firemen. The rescued student spent a few days in the hospital recovering from smoke inhalation, but did recover.
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In those days the college's computer facilities were in the northwest basement area of Cochran. Rooms that once were the Cochran Hall Dining Facility, and later the Faculty Dining Room, were then housing a remote job entry station to Battelle consisting of a control station, a card reader and a line printer. There were also a number of keypunches and many card file cabinets.
When Roger Wiley, director of the computer center, and the students who were there realized that the building was on fire they simply unplugged the equipment from the wall and carried it out onto the street. After a bit of deliberation, Roger brought his pickup truck over and the equipment was carried to the Science Building and installed in one of the first floor classrooms. The next day the computer repairman and the phone company installer reconnected everything and the computer facilities were once again in operation. The payroll that month still ran on time.
Cochran Hall suffered considerable fire damage inside, and was determined to be unsafe. The ground floor area that is now the offices of the Chaplain, Career Development, and Business is all that remains.