Fire on Old Orange Road displaces family of seven

A fire destroyed a house Sunday morning at 20475 Old Orange Road, displacing a family of seven.

According to Lee Wilson, fire chief of Rapidan Co. 10, no one was injured in the blaze, which started around 6 a.m. on the second floor.

“It’s unknown what caused the fire,” said Wilson, who said his unit was first on location within eight to 10 minutes of the 911 call. “It would all be speculation at this time.”

Sgt. Jim Fox, spokesman for the Culpeper County Sheriff’s Office, said the blaze is not suspicious and is not being investigated by the CCSO.

Stacy Carpenter, chief of Culpeper Co. 1, was in charge at the scene but could not be reached for comment.

When Wilson arrived, flames were showing from the second floor. It took firefighters about 20 to 30 minutes to get the blaze under control.

“Unfortunately,” Wilson said, “with the winds we had, it grew rather quickly. … The flames spread quickly in a lot of hidden spaces.”

Wilson said the old farmhouse, built in the early 1900s, had balloon construction — beams that run from the foundation to the second floor. Such a configuration can cause a house to burn quickly and make it difficult for firefighters to detect flare-ups behind walls.

A spokesman for the American Red Cross said Tony Ochoa lived at the residence as head of household.

The Inskeep family owns the house under the name of Battlepark Farms.

Crews from Culpeper, Reva, Brandy Station and Salem also responded to the fire.

“It was a good team effort from everybody,” Wilson said, adding that firefighters stayed until about noon assisting family members with salvaging personal items. “They had quite a bit of things.”

Sunday’s blaze was the latest in a string of fires that have occurred in Culpeper over the past month.

“You seem to have a larger number of incidents during the holidays,” Wilson said, “because you have more time when people are home. There’s more outlets being used, more fireplaces being used, more cooking outlets being used. There’s more potential for things to go wrong.”

Landlord Jack Inskeep said the Ochoa family — five adults and two children — has lived in the house for three or four years.

“Definitely a tragedy,” he said. “Right now we haven’t had a chance to get together to see what we can do.”

Inskeep said the family is staying with friends, and the American Red Cross is providing short-term emergency assistance.

“We’re just now getting a Red Cross volunteer out there, but we’ll be getting help for them in the next few nights,” Jack Jones, of the Central Virginia chapter, said Sunday night.

The house has been in the Inskeep family since they purchased it from the Oswald Hudson family in the late 1970s. The Inskeeps farm corn and soybeans on the land, which is about half a mile south of U.S. 15.

Byrd Inskeep believes Ochoa worked for a right-of-way mowing company in the Inlet area.

Rob Humphreys can be reached at 825-0771 ext. 128 or

Editor’s note: In the original draft of this story, the Star-Exponent described the Ochoa family as Hispanic because their last name was not yet available. We felt this would give readers a better understanding of the situation and provide appropriate detail. Once we discovered the family’s last name, we inserted it into the story but forgot to remove the “Hispanic” designation. The story has now been edited correctly.