- Date
- 1980-10-28
- Kind
- Disaster
- Where
- Beaver Island
- Carried out by
- Beaver Island Volunteer Fire Department
- Eras
- Modern era
- Concepts
- disastercommunitytourism
- Within
- Beaver Island
Summary
The December 1980 Beaver Beacon reports that Donald Williams of Pontiac died in a trailer fire on October 28. The trailer was described as being across from Circle M. By the time the Beaver Island Fire Department reached it, the entire structure had collapsed.
Evidence and limits
This record preserves the newspaper’s date, name, reported home location, and the broad response description. It does not establish whether Williams was a resident or visitor, identify the trailer’s owner or parcel, provide a cause of fire, describe the death investigation, list other occupants, or supply a fire- department, medical, or civil death record.
The same article reports a separate, nonfatal Richie Gillespie house fire and does not give that fire an exact date. The two reports are kept distinct rather than treating the December article as a single incident.
Open questions
- Can a civil, medical, coroner, township, or fire-department record confirm the death and cause?
- Where exactly was the trailer across from Circle M, and who owned or occupied it?
- What became of the separate Richie Gillespie house after the reported fire?
Sources
- Remote OCR used for page-level reading; the scan remains the visual source. The article also mentions a separate Richie Gillespie house fire with no exact date; that separate event is not merged into this record. The holding institution's portal restricts automated access; the archive holds a copy of this issue and can provide it on request.data1 · beaver-island-archive · beaver_beacon · 1980-12_Beaver-Beacon
- Contemporaneous issue scan reporting that Donald Williams of Pontiac died in a trailer fire on October 28 and that the structure had collapsed before the Fire Department arrived. It does not provide a death certificate, cause determination, trailer ownership, exact parcel, complete occupant list, or response log. The held eighteen-page issue scan is paired with the OCR source and does not expand source-specific claimsdata1 · beaver-island-archive · scans · beaver_beacon · issues · 1980-12_Beaver-Beacon
Added 2 August 2026 · revised 3 August 2026. Recent changes
Cite this article
Beaver Island Archive, “Donald Williams dies in a trailer fire on Beaver Island, 1980”, https://beaverislandarchive.org/events/beaver-island-donald-williams-fatal-trailer-fire-1980/, accessed [date], citing Beaver Beacon, December 1980, remote Chandra OCR, “Fire.” (and 1 further source listed on the page).
Last revised 2026-08-03. Fill in [date] with the date you read it — this page is static and cannot know that.
BibTeX for “Donald Williams dies in a trailer fire on Beaver Island, 1980”RIS for “Donald Williams dies in a trailer fire on Beaver Island, 1980”