SHIRLEY — After 47 years of practicing here, chiropractor Dr. Robert Tennant finds himself having to rebuild after a fire destroyed all the clinic’s equipment and left the building uninhabitable.
“It’s just been exhausting, losing everything,” Tennant said.
The Tennant Chiropractic Clinic employed three people — Tennant, a nurse, and an office manager — until Feb. 9, when a fire started that burned for 12 hours, destroying the inside of the building on Main Street. While the doctor’s records were preserved in a fireproof case, Tennant lost all of his medical equipment.
Tennant attributed the cause of the fire to the unusually cold weather. The water pipes inside the clinic froze, he said, and a repairman who came to fix the problem used a tool that caused material to ignite. The cause is still being studied by authorities.
After so many years in the same location, Tennant said, the emotional impact of losing the building is what hits the hardest.
“It’s just dreadful,” he said. “It’s awfully hard to explain.”
Josh Willis, assistant chief of the Shirley Volunteer Fire Department, said the fire at the clinic was an exceptionally hard one to extinguish. It spread to the attic of the building, which was difficult for firefighters to access.
“We couldn’t really get to it from the inside because the ceilings were collapsing, and we couldn’t really get to it from the roof because it was unstable,” he said.
Local firefighters worked for hours to find the best way to approach the fire while keeping it from spreading to any nearby buildings, Willis said. The small volunteer force received plenty of assistance: Fire departments from Wilkinson, Knightstown, Charlottesville, Green Township and other communities came to help. Willis said Shirley residents even brought hot chocolate to the scene to warm up the responders.
The fire was finally put out around 2 a.m. Feb. 10, but it was too late for the building to be saved.
Originally from North Carolina, Tennant chose Shirley as the location to establish his practice in 1974 after graduating from the National College of Chiropractic in Illinois, which has since merged with the National University of Health Sciences.
Since then, Tennant has been an active figure in his field, which focuses on the treatment of back pain and other musculoskeletal problems. He is a past president of the Indiana State Chiropractic Association and was voted its chiropractor of the year in 1992, 2005 and 2013. He serves on the boards of several other national and international chiropractic organizations.
Tennant isn’t planning on giving up his practice. He is making plans to move into a new location in Greenfield, which he plans to announce to his patients as soon as he can. Tennant said he has patients all over central Indiana, and he hopes they will continue seeing him at the new location.
“When we relocate, I think they’ll follow,” he said.
The doctor said he is grateful for the community response he’s had in Shirley, where several neighbors volunteered to help his family go through the remains of the building to see what was left.
“It’s a relationship that I would consider extremely friendly,” Tennant said. “It’s been a reward to be in the community all this time.”