A fire tore though the Armory Building in Aberdeen, Washington, on Saturday morning, destroying the Aberdeen Museum of History and its dedicated Kurt Cobain exhibit. According to NPR, nobody was inside the building when the fire started at around 9:30 AM, and no injuries have been reported. But it took 77 firefighters from 14 different counties over 10 hours to get the blaze under control, and local paper The Daily World reports that the Armory is now “a vacant hulk, roofless with blackened windows, and full of charred rubble.”
The museum housed a number of Cobain relics, including a couch that the Nirvana frontman slept on at a friend’s house in the fall of 1985. The Armory Building was a popular stop for those who travelled to Cobain’s hometown to learn about his childhood.
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How much might be salvaged from the building is still unclear. Many of the museum’s historical papers were housed in its basement, and few were backed up electronically. “We’re trying to put together a group to recover the archives and documents in the basement,” Aberdeen Mayor Erik Larson told The Daily World. “It doesn’t appear they were damaged by fire, but they were flooded. We’ll try to go in and recover what can be recovered.” Per NPR, the fate of the Cobain artifacts is similarly unknown.
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