Historic artifacts, including a copy of the proclamation of France’s approval of the Louisiana Purchase and a yearbook from Fidel Castro’s high school, were rescued Tuesday night from a four-alarm fire that damaged the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum in St. Louis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
About 80 firefighters rushed in and out of the museum, housed in what was once the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, hauling out armloads of one-of-a-kind documents, manuscripts, statues and intricately carved wooden ship models, even as they battled 8-foot-high flames.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“They knew they were in a museum,” Fire Chief Dennis Jenkerson told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch<\/em>. “It’s like, ‘Don’t leave empty-handed. Grab something and get it out of here.’ “<\/p>\n\n\n\n The blaze raged for about two hours, destroying much of the second floor of the 107-year-old Greek Revival building. The ceiling caved in while at least 20 firefighters were inside. “The entire ceiling came down around and on some of these guys,” Jenkerson said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n npr<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Historic artifacts, including a copy of the proclamation of France’s approval of the Louisiana Purchase and a yearbook from Fidel Castro’s high school, were rescued Tuesday night from a four-alarm fire that damaged the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum in St. Louis. About 80 firefighters rushed in and out of the museum, housed in what was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1767,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1766"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1766"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1769,"href":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1766\/revisions\/1769"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}