Fire Destroys Home Of Well-Known ‘Doc’

By Katy Savage, Standard Staff

SOUTH ROYALTON — The weight of fumes knocked Ronald “RG” Gadway Jr. backward after he opened the garage door of his family home last Wednesday afternoon.

The tractor — the one he used for barn chores — was ablaze. Flames were shooting out the garage roof and the fire was beginning to spread into the rest of the house. It spread into the upstairs bedroom where his wife Gina, 30, and her 9-year-old son were playing video games.

“RG started screaming,” said Gina, who was upstairs as a part of the house collapsed.

After her kids got outside, Gina jumped down the stairs and RG carried her out the front door, which happened to be open. Her brother, Derrick Wright, 35, was transported to Gifford Medical Center for smoke inhalation after he tried to rescue the family pets.

Though most escaped serious injuries, nine people were displaced on Wednesday at the Morgan horse farm in South Royalton belonging to RG’s father, Ronald “Doc” Gadway, 85 and his wife, Judy. A four-month old Chihuahua, used as a service dog for Gina’s son’s post-traumatic stress disorder, died, along with a cat.

“It finally hits you when you see your whole life going up in smoke, all you want to do is save everything, ‘this is what I need, this is what I have to have, oh my God I don’t want this to burn,’ but you just can’t save it,” Gina said.

A 15-year-old diesel tractor is what the family said caused the fire. The tractor had just been used to do barn chores and the family had just come inside to get warm.

“This is my whole childhood,” RG Gadway, 25, said Friday, looking at what was left of the home he grew up in. Gina and her four kids, 13, 12, 11 and 4 months, moved in a year ago.

Doc Gadway built the house in 1998 after he retired from a career in medicine to run a Morgan horse farm.

At one time, Royalton’s Sunrise Farm was a boarding, breeding and training facility with 40 horses. Gadway downsized for health reasons in 2008.

All 13 horses at the farm the day of the fire were unharmed and the barn area, which sits away from the house, was untouched.

The house itself was a total loss.

“It was a fairly open structure so it didn’t take long to take off,” South Royalton Fire Chief Paul Brock said.

Doc Gadway, a well-known doctor who delivered 6,000 babies in his career, was so popular, expectant mothers traveled from New York, New Hampshire and the Canadian border to have him deliver their babies.

He came to South Royalton in 1961 and built a clinic near Bethel in 1974. He kept a horse at his office and would ride whenever he had the chance.

Horses and helping people are his two passions. Doc Gadway started the first ambulance and rescue squad in the area in the 1960s, before there was such a concept.

“There were so many accidents and we didn’t have any equipment there to take care of that poor customer,” Doc Gadway said.

He piled tools, like chainsaws and crowbars, in a SUV to cut people free of their vehicles. The weight of the SUV was so heavy, “It’d ride on the axle the entire time,” Doc Gadway said.

The local funeral home director drove the injured to the hospital in hearses at the time. Eventually Doc Gadway got an ambulance that he parked at his former house and he bought radios.

“There wasn’t anybody around doing it,” Doc Gadway said.

Now, the inside of his home is charred. The living room chair that he sat in to watch TV was black; fried from the flames.

The Gadways want to keep living there.

Doc Gadway and his wife were going to move into the tack room, shift the saddles around in the barn and get a space heater to keep them warm. It’s small and there is no warm water, but a cat, who escaped from the fire, seemed to enjoy the warmth last Friday.

“It’s tough when all the animals are here,” Judy said, holding back tears last week.

A GoFundMe account was created to help the family rebuild.

“This is our home,” Gina said. “Our home is smoke and coals; we’ve got nothing but our horses. This is all we know. The horses are our lives.”

“That barn right now, it’s home for us.”

This article first appeared in the March 4, 2016 edition of the Vermont Standard.