Shortly after the Eaton Fire devastated Altadena, California, burning more than 6,000 homes and 3,000 additional structures, local resident Eric Garland took a walk around his neighborhood with his daughter, Lucy.

“We were in total disbelief and devastation,” he says. “We walked our block, stopping to weep about every 100 yards, gasping at what was gone and what remains. As we were standing in front of my neighbor Fred’s debris field, we noticed there was this beautiful standing chimney with this perfect Batchelder tile surround. It was this glorious piece of art and it was like there wasn’t a chip on it. It was still vibrant and beautiful.”

All over Altadena, thousands of fireplaces and chimneys still stand on lots otherwise reduced to ash, the last sentinels in a decimated landscape. Many are covered in historic tiles by artist Ernest Batchelder, a leader of the Arts and Crafts movement. The surviving tiles and fireplaces are (largely) all that’s left of those homes and of some of Altadena’s most historic architecture. As Garland and his daughter walked that day, they pondered those solitary soldiers. “We thought, ‘One day, fifty or a hundred years from now, there will be a new Altadena and the only piece of old Altadena that any of these people will have is that fireplace,” he says. “We stood and appreciated that for about five seconds and then my daughter said to me, ‘But who saves the fireplaces?’”

Founded somewhere around 1875, Altadena has long had a rich architectural landscape full of worker cottages, Craftsman bungalows, Mission-style mansions, and everything in between. Development in the town boomed starting in 1887 when Andrew McNally, of the Rand-McNally map printing family, moved out from Chicago. He invited other wealthy friends to come enjoy the California weather and soon people like newspaper mogul William Armiger Scripps and noted author Zane Grey were building homes. (McNally’s grandson, Wallace Neff, started his career in Altadena in the 1920s before going on to become one of Southern California’s most significant architects.)

When building homes in the 1910s and ’20s, Altadenans often looked to Batchelder’s studio for decorative ceramic tiles to decorate and surround their fireplaces. His neutral field tiles matched all sorts of styles and his more detailed art tiles helped elevate mantle pieces or add pizzazz to even the most basic of homes. (The artist’s first studio was just a few miles away in Pasadena, which is why his work can be found all over the region, from the Pasadena Playhouse to a Dutch-themed chocolate shop in downtown Los Angeles.)

Before the fires, the Pasadena Museum of History’s Batchelder Tile Registry included just eight homes in Altadena. But after Garland, a tech investor by trade, left his walk with his daughter, he called a few neighborhood friends he knew were preservation-minded and within days put together a group to perhaps tackle the issue of the tiles. They met that weekend in a parking lot and, surprisingly, dozens more volunteers showed up to help, and the group completed what was essentially an architectural survey of the burn zone, walking every street and noting every possibly Batchelder-style fireplace still standing. 

They came away with a list of over 200 structures, and, armed with an online address database, set about finding the homeowners. With help from a local mason, Cliff Douglas, they were able to offer those contacted a free service: Professional tile retrieval and storage, conducted quickly, before the Army Corps Of Engineers rolled through to remove debris and level each lot. While lots were slow to be cleared immediately after the fire, the Corps now says the goal is to have 80 to 100 lot-clearing crews operating seven days a week throughout Altadena, often giving residents just 72 hours notice before their debris is removed.

Those rumbling trucks and backhoes have put the Save The Tiles crew in the hot seat. Now, the group has a GoFundMe, which it’s using to keep the tile removal and repair service free for affected homeowners, paying four crews of extremely skilled professional masons working seven days a week to remove tiles, which is somehow an even more daunting process than one might think. Douglas estimates that the flames burning homes in the Eaton Fire were hitting temperatures north of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, meaning the fire reduced every piece of wood in a home to ash, including walls and ceilings but also floors and floor joists. (It also melted glass and steel beams, and left tens of thousands of once-useful but now dangerous nails scattered over each burn site.) To date, Save The Tiles has rescued more than 50 houses’ Batchelder tiles.

“While we know the house and everything that was in it is gone, the tiles are a physical reminder that the fire didn’t take everything.”

The process isn’t perfect: The group is made up of a bunch of well-meaning volunteers, after all. They can only do what they can fund, and they’re learning everything they know as they go along, recruiting ceramicists and tile experts eager to help along the way. (Garland jokes that he now knows more about tile that he ever needed or wanted to.)

On the February day I visit Douglas and his crew at a removal site just east of Lake Avenue, the mason and a couple helpers are using a piece of rebar as a lever, pushing against a massive cement or stone hearth that had once dropped down into a home’s foundation. Against a background of destruction (that also somehow includes that same home’s standing shower stall full of comparatively boring white modern subway tile), Douglas pulls out tile after tile, carefully stacking them in boxes marked with the home’s address. When he grabs what he can from one area, they move the rebar and wrench up a different portion of the hearth, ultimately saving what he estimates is about 90 percent of the once 200 or so four-inch tiles on the fireplace.

Down the street, Douglas’s daughter, Devin—who works in the family business—is hard at work as well, carefully tap-tap-tapping under each tile’s edge on another more intact fireplace. She pulls one thick, handmade tile off at a time before walking down to visit her dad, saying she needs his crew’s help to tackle her hearth. It’s a painstaking process, with Douglas saying each house can take anywhere from a couple of hours if he’s just reclaiming a few featured tiles or a few days depending on how much tile there is to rescue.

And there is a lot of tile. Garland says he’s seen chimneys that stand three-stories tall, with a Batchelder fireplace on each level. He’s not sure how or even if they’ll be able to tackle structures like that, given that, while well-made, these towering chimneys aren’t actually attached to anything anymore and are thus pretty dangerous, but he’s willing to do what he can. While some homeowners are trying to tackle their tile themselves, it can be dicey work, with the thermal shock brought on by the quick heating up and cooling down of the fires making some of the tile brittle. Other experts have been brought into the Save The Tiles loop as well, whether because they were contacted by homeowners looking for help or because they simply saw the group’s GoFundMe or mission being passed around and wanted to help.

Amy Green of Silverlake Conservation says she’d been in touch with at least one Altadena homeowner looking for advice before she was contacted by Stanley Zucker, Garland’s neighbor and Save The Tiles cofounder. “Batchelder must have been a really good businessman because the roots of his business were deep and wide,” Green says. “When you think of classic Craftsman finishes, for instance, you’re thinking about Batchelder tile. I think at some point in the ’20s, it was just like everybody wanted his kind of finish. Tile design definitely goes through phases where suddenly everything’s checkerboard or whatever, and at that time, it was these tiles—especially in Southern California.”

Even now, Green says, “if you’re someone who’s buying a ninety- or hundred-year-old house, you’re interested in the finishes that are original to the home.” And if you’re someone whose 90- or 100-year-old house just burnt down, along with the rest of the 90- to 100-year-old homes around it, then that old Batchelder tile could be just the thing to connect whatever’s new and next to what once was.

That’s certainly the case for Brenda Davidge, whose family bought their five-bedroom 1911 Craftsman back in 2016 in part because they loved the home’s Batchelder tile, which depicted a castle scene and a young boy. When she went back to her house the morning after the wildfire, all that was left was the chimney. So when she heard about Save The Tiles, she reached out for help. “Since we plan on rebuilding,” she says, “I definitely want to incorporate what I can from the old house, including other things I found sifting [through the ashes] like the original front door handle and whatever bricks we can salvage.”

Davidge says Save The Tiles salvaged her Batchelder pieces about six weeks after the fire and she was thoroughly impressed with the process. The group is repairing the tiles in volunteer homes and workplaces for the time being, before they’re moved to a warehouse where they’ll be stored until homeowners can reclaim them—however long it takes to rebuild. But Davidge says she appreciated that some of the tile restoration began on-site. 

“As they were coming off, they were cleaning them up and some of them had cracked, and so they were using this special museum-grade glue to get them back together,” Davidge says. “One of the masons pointed out that on some of the tiles now, there’s a bunch of embedded glass, like something exploded in front of them and the glass flew, sort of like shrapnel, and embedded itself into the tile. He got it off, no problem, and it was so meticulous.”

Though Davidge says part of the reason she wanted the tile was because she fully intends to put a fireplace in her new home, she also saw the process as being fairly therapeutic. “Whether you’re grieving a person or, in this case, a house filled with memories, it helps to have something that you can physically hang on to,” she explains. “Having the tile helps us with moving forward because while we know the house and everything that was in it is gone, the tiles are a physical reminder that the fire didn’t take everything, that these things have lasted a hundred-plus years and made it through that crazy fire so they can keep going beyond that too. It’s like a piece of the past we can use to look toward the future so that hopefully our kids and our kids’ kids and their kids will get to enjoy these tiles just like we did.”

Top photo by Nick Agro