LIVERMORE -- The crown jewel of the Washburn-Norlands Living History Center -- an Italianate grand mansion where one of Maine's most illustrious families once lived -- still stands after a fire struck the property Monday.

The building's survival was cold comfort to 19-year-old Dylan Clark, who stood in the rain the next day, staring at the smoldering pile of rubble where an attached farmer's cottage and dairy barn had burned to the ground.

For Clark, who has volunteered and worked at the center since he was 14, those two buildings represented the heart of Norlands, as the center is known to generations of schoolchildren who have visited since it opened to the public in 1974.

The mansion housed the artifacts that could not be touched. The cottage and the barn were where visitors spent the entire day learned to spin wool, feed oxen -- and really get a sense of what Maine rural life was like in the 1870s. They were even given names of real-life villagers who lived near the estate, like members of the Pray and Waters families.

"There are memories in there," said Clark, his shirt soaked through as he walked the perimeter of the former barn. "That's where the pigs were, in that corner. The chickens were over here. It's hard to believe it's gone -- just like that."

The fire, according to the state Fire Marshal's Office, was an accident involving a heat lamp used to warm a sow and her 18 piglets, born just the day before.

By the time firefighters arrived on the scene shortly after 9 p.m., the fire had jumped from the barn to the connecting farmer's cottage.

"The flames had shot up 50 feet in the air," said firefighter Nicholas Emerson. "I could see it from my house, three, four miles away."

The sow and her piglets perished in the blaze, along with three chickens, but no people were injured. The fire did not spread to the mansion, thanks to a backhoe brought in to peel the cottage off.

On Tuesday, volunteers and board members, some of whom had stayed up all night running into the mansion to save furniture and Victorian clothing collection, sloshed through the mud to inspect the damage.

The two oxen and a cow and calf were taken by community members that morning, but five sheep were staying behind and needed to be looked in on regularly, said volunteer Garnett Rutherford.

In a carriage-house-turned-gift-shop several yards away from where the barn stood, Kathy Beauregard, president of the board of trustees, spoke with contractors who came by to offer their services.

"We're not really working on anything right now," said Roger Soucy, of PuroClean, a company that specializes in cleaning up water and fire damage.

They agreed to meet again tomorrow morning. "Break of day," Beauregard said. Beauregard said that the board intends to rebuild the barn and cottage, which were insured, but with an operating budget of $200,000, the project will require major donations and in-kind services.

"We encourage people with expertise or skills to help with the recovery efforts," Beauregard said, noting that even though the mansion was not burned, it had suffered smoke and water damage.

State historian Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr. said with the proper amount of money, the barn and the farmer's cottage -- both built in the 1870s and renovated decades later -- could be replicated. That was the case with the one-room schoolhouse, which was rebuilt after an arsonist set fire to the original in the late 1980s

By contrast, the mansion, which housed the Washburn family -- who in one generation turned out two governors, four congressmen, one newspaper editor and one Navy captain -- would have been near-impossible to replace, Shettleworth said.

"The mansion, because of its elaborateness in both exterior and interior detailing, to say nothing of the priceless furnishings, art objects and portraits, would have been a much more severe loss," he said.

Shettleworth said the barn and the cottage posed more of a sentimental loss to "thousands of children out there now becoming adults who had a wonderful experience at Norlands, learning about Maine history and rural life."

Clark, who had come to see the center right after he got off work delivering pizzas, reminisced with other volunteers about the fun schoolchildren had visiting. He recalled meeting a boy, maybe 10 or 11, who made a special request after getting off the school bus.

"Hi, can I be called Otis Pray?" That was what the boy's father had been called when he had visited as a child.