MANKATO — It wasn’t the kind of loss that a community mourns. In fact, almost no one in the community knew it was there, or why someone might notice that it’s gone.

But for the ones who did, the flames shooting out of the windows of that yellow brick house at the corner of James and Fairfield avenues two weeks ago signaled the loss of a landmark.

Fans of Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy and Tacy books may remember a character called Mr. Meecham, a dignitary in town with a long white beard and a coachman. That house — now reduced to a pile of bricks and an exposed foundation — belonged to the real-life James Tinkcom, upon whom the Meecham character is based.

Don’t know Mr. Meecham? Never read the books? If you had you may recall some memorable moments in book three, “Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill.”

In one chapter, Betsy, Tacy and Tib get into an argument with Betsy’s sister Julia, and Tacy’s sister Katie. Both groups wanted to hold a pageant with their own choice for queen, and neither side would budge. Betsy’s father intervenes by telling them to let a neighborhood vote settle it.

The girls go to great lengths to get signatures, but the hunt leads Betsy, Tacy and Tib to a part of town they’d never been to before — over the Big Hill to Little Syria.

This adventure is one of the most memorable of their lives as they meet immigrant families that had settled near Mankato. They meet the family of a little girl who, a few days earlier, they’d rescued from bullies who were pushing her, calling her “Dago” and pulling on her long, braided pigtails. The trio surrounded the little girl, shielding her from harm.

In the end they learn that little girl is actually a princess from Syria, and they invite her to be the queen in a joint pageant with Betsy, Tacy, Tib, Julia and Katie.

On March 7, when the house caught fire, it was no accident. Tim Zehnder’s fire safety school was using the house for participants in his program to hone their firefighting skills.

Zehnder said he got a call from the home owner offering the house up for fire practice.

“I said yep,” Zehnder said, “and we set it on fire.”

As smoke filled the sky, a few people driving by stopped to see the action. One of them was Lona Falenczykowski, one of the most active members of the Betsy-Tacy Society.

She worried the smoke was coming from one of two houses: Betsy’s house, or Tacy’s house, both of which the society has worked to renovate.

Her worst fears weren’t realized, but it wasn’t good, she said, to see the Meecham house go down.

Falenczykowski said Meecham, er, Tinkcom ran a drug store and dealt in real estate. The Betsy-Tacy Society has known about the house for years, and it was, in fact, on the long list of sites on its Deep Valley Walking Tour. (Deep Valley is the fictional name of the town in the Betsy and Tacy series.)

But while the group has renovated two homes, it simply couldn’t afford to save this one. So now it sits a sad occupant of the corner of James and Fairfield, surrounded by orange construction fence and police tape. Get anywhere near it and the smell of burnt wood hits you. And on a parking lot next to it, kids have chalked their names in the tar, including a heart with “TIM” inside.

If it’s any consolation to Betsy and Tacy fans, the house that burned down probably wasn’t the house Lovelace thought it was.

Lovelace admitted long after publication, Falenczykowski said, that she was mistaken about which house was Tinkcom’s.

So the house she eloquently described, complete with vicious dog, belonged to someone else.