Jillbette Fletcher was 13 years old when her father shook her awake around 4:30 a.m. on Monday, July 20, 1981. Smoke was drifting through the open windows of their two-story wooden home on Park Avenue. Next door, the 85-foot Silver King Coalition Mine Building was engulfed in flames.

"You have a, what, eight-story building on fire next to your family home that's just a two-story wooden structure," Fletcher told KPCW on Tuesday, July 22. "The entire building was on fire. It went up like a tinder."

Sunday, July 20, 2026, marked the 45th anniversary of the blaze that destroyed one of Park City's most recognizable landmarks and left a scar on the community's identity that persists to this day.

A frantic dawn

Fletcher's father, Mel Fletcher, was a volunteer firefighter. He knew the mine building couldn't be saved. He and his son Rex trained garden hoses on the front of the family home while Jillbette, her mother Peggy, and her grandmother Blanche loaded into the car with the family pets and drove to the top of Main Street.

Across the street, 26-year-old Michael Watts ran from his Empire Avenue home to check on his parents, Betty and Burnis Watts, who were spraying down their own house. That house is now part of the High West Distillery.

Watts told KPCW the heat was so intense that neighbors were scrambling to spray down adjacent buildings to keep them from igniting.

Fire crews from Heber, Kamas, and Coalville joined Park City's volunteers. About 50 firefighters and 10 pieces of equipment responded, according to the Park City Museum's account of the fire. Volunteer firefighter Jim White, one of the first on scene, reported that roofs on seven or eight nearby houses were smoking.

The heat melted the plastic bubble on a fire truck and incinerated a small car parked outside the chain-link fence surrounding the building. By about 6 a.m., only a smoking skeleton of massive timbers remained.

Mining monument, community marker

Built in 1901, the Silver King Coalition Building served as the lower terminal of an aerial tramway that carried ore down from the Silver King Mine in 80 buckets across 7,300 feet. It stood for 80 years between the Union Pacific and Denver, Rio Grande Western railroad depots, just north of Heber Avenue. Its image became the logo for Park City Mountain Resort.

The fire became a cultural dividing line. If you were in Park City when the Coalition Building burned, you were a "real local," according to a 2021 Park Record account. Everyone who arrived afterward? Still a newcomer.

Watts, now 71, said the building's loss changed the dynamics of development on Lower Main Street. Four years after the fire, the Town Lift's lower terminal was built on the same site.

How it started

The night before the fire, the Beach Boys played an outdoor concert at Park West, now part of Park City Mountain's Canyons Village, according to the Park City Museum. Three men in their 20s and early 30s attended the show, drifted into town, climbed a chain-link fence into the building, and built a fire on the wooden floor. They left around 3 a.m., later testifying they believed the fire was out.

In a trial that November, the three were convicted of reckless burning, a Class A misdemeanor. Park City detective Lloyd Evans testified that one of the men had been wearing a T-shirt bearing the image of the Coalition Building.

Fletcher, now 58, remains skeptical. She noted it was one of the hottest nights of the year and the men passed up closer shelter with easier access.