Owner’s permitted brush fire ignited historic Conrad Fuchs house

The controlled burn that ended up destroying the historic Conrad Fuchs house in Horseshoe Bay was started by the property owner. Paul Raley got a permit from the Horseshoe Bay Fire Department to burn a 5-foot-by-5-foot brush pile on Sunday, Feb. 25. 

An ember from the fire blew onto the roof and started the blaze, leaving only the outside stone walls of the 150-year-old home standing.

Raley was burning the brush to “bring the property back up to a beautiful state,” he told DailyTrib.com.

He had spent the past six months cleaning the 2.6-acre property.

“There was a whole lot of dead brush on the live oaks that had been trimmed up,” Raley said. “There was also a lot of overgrown shrubbery and bushes around the property.”

He had from 12:30 p.m. Feb. 25 to sunset to burn the brush per the rules of the permit obtained by DailyTrib.com. 

Raley started the fire at around 1 p.m. About 30 minutes later, he observed smoke coming from the roof of the home’s porch.

“I ran over there and drug my water hose over there to try and get (the flames),” he said.

Raley realized the fire had reached the historic structure’s cedar shake shingles and swiftly scaled a ladder to reach it while calling 911.

“There was this really thick smoke that encircled me,” he said. “I was on the top of the roof and tried to take cover behind the chimney, but I just remember not being able to see a thing up there and feeling all the smoke. At that point, I was fearful for my life since it was so strong and hot and I couldn’t see my way down.”

Raley believes sudden gusts of wind blew the embers onto the roof.

“The wind picked up a couple of times,” he said. “It must have carried it up to the roof of the porch.”

Winds during the time of the fire were about 7-9 mph, a figure inside the range permitted by the Horseshoe Bay Fire Department for outdoor burning.

The cedar shake roof was next on Raley’s list of improvements. He had planned to replace it with a modern, composite shingle to boost fire security. Materials for the project lay in the front yard, untouched by the fire.

“It’s a composite shingle that looks like a cedar shake,” he said of the new roof. “It was going to look like it belonged on an old house.”

Raley filed the roofing permit on Feb. 14, just 11 days before the fire. 

“We’ve been preparing to do the roof for a minute,” he said. “We were just waiting for it to be authorized by the city.”

Raley said the roof replacement holdup was on a long list of “red tape” issues he has encountered since purchasing the home in March 2020.

“It was just a struggle to figure out what we need to do to move this forward,” he said. “It wasn’t easy.”

The city and Historical Preservation Advisory Committee members also had a problem with a proposed detached garage, Raley said.

“We didn’t want to change the look of the house because it’s a big rock structure, so adding a connected part for a garage wouldn’t have worked,” he said. “We were trying to put it back behind the property and off to the right so it was detached and wasn’t in conflict with the theme of the rock house, but that was definitely an issue for them.”

After the renovations were completed, Raley hoped to one day open the home to the public so people could learn more about Highland Lakes history. Conrad Fuchs was an early Burnet County settler who built the timber home in the late 1870s or early 1880s as a post office. It also served as one of the first schools in the area.

“It was going to be a tribute to the long-lasting beauty of the Fuchs house, but you have to be able to get through permitting to be allowed to do these kinds of things,” Raley said. “We lived for this remodel.”

The burned-out home’s future remains unclear.

“I’m hoping we can find a way to save a portion or a corner of the facade and utilize that somehow as a tribute in a new home or reusing the rock in a new house next to it and leaving the actual footprint, possibly,” Raley said. “We have to figure out what we are allowed to do and then what can we do.”

A GoFundMe webpage has been set up for donations to Raley and his family as they navigate the loss of their historic home. Over $6,700 had been donated as of the afternoon of Feb. 29.

nathan@thepicayune.com