A fire in a former Lehighton school Thursday morning destroyed toys collected so far for a drive meant to fill the hole left by Toys for Tots in Carbon County.

The same fire closed LHH Learn and Play day care at 335 N. Fourth St., which had been storing them, displacing 78 children and 12 staff members.

Replacement is already underway. Zion United Church of Christ in Lehighton announced Thursday night that its consistory had voted to cover the loss, and Nicole Collier of LHH Learn and Play said the church is giving the drive a $4,000 check. New, unwrapped toys will be collected at Lehighton’s last home football game Friday night. Gates open at 5:30 p.m.

The fire call came in just after 6 a.m. at the three-story building. Lehighton Fire Chief Patrick Mriss was first on scene.

“I had a smoke condition,” Mriss said. “Started doing a 360 of the building and found fire through the windows on the north side of the building and the basement area.”

Two employees and a parent dropping off a child were inside at the time, Mriss said. The day care was just opening for the day. No one was hurt.

Crews knocked the fire down quickly but stayed for hours. Lehighton, Franklin Township and Mahoning Township companies responded initially, and Mriss called a second alarm to stage crews in case the fire spread.

“We were able to contain it to a certain area,” Mriss said. “It was probably extinguished within 10 minutes, but we were there for quite some time because, due to the size of the building, it took a long time for us to get all the smoke out. The whole building was charged with smoke.”

The cause is under investigation by the state police fire marshal’s unit. Mriss had no estimate of the damage, saying that is for insurance adjusters to determine.

“It can’t be occupied due to loss of utilities,” Mriss said of the building. “Wiring, we had broken water pipes, and of course the gas was shut off. So there’s absolutely no utilities to the building right now.”

The toys inside were for a drive the day care started after Toys for Tots ended its Carbon County program. They had been stored in the basement, in what had been the school’s gymnasium.

“We actually can’t even go back in the building,” Collier said. “The primary fire was on the basement floor, and the floor where we were storing the toys, which was like a big gymnasium, was the primary source of the fire.”

Most of the toys had been collected less than a week earlier at the Lehighton-Palmerton football game. Collier put the loss somewhere around $3,000 to $3,500, but said the figure is a guess and could be higher.

“We had a really successful event with the mayor on Friday night, and he helped us bring them all back,” Collier said. “We were standing in the room chatting.”

Collier said she and her staff were watching the building burn before anyone made the connection.

“It dawned on all of us that that’s where the toys were, and it was just a crushing moment,” she said. “We started this off trying to save Christmas, and it felt like that went up in flames.”

Zion UCC’s check will go toward replacing what was bought, Collier said. She is hoping to stretch it.

“We’re hoping, since it’s a check and we can go shopping, maybe use Black Friday to kind of amplify what we could get,” Collier said.

The drive still has far more to collect than it lost. More than 200 names are on its list, with ages across the board, and nothing had been set aside yet for teenagers.

“While we lost a ton of toys and it’s heartbreaking, we still have a long way to go,” Collier said. “What we had didn’t fix the need.”

The more urgent problem is the day care itself. Collier said 78 families are waiting for it to reopen.

Collier said Behavioral Health Associates offered Little Helping Hands a building it had moved out of, at 325 Alum St., and is readying the space at no cost. Collier said staff spent Friday pushing paperwork to get the state to approve the relocation.

“Our friends at BHA reached out to us and saved us,” Collier said. “They still own or lease the building, and they’ve given us the space. They’re cleaning it. They’re getting it ready. We’re just absolutely humbled by them.”

“It was literally a day of just kind of moving mountains,” she said.

Along with the Lehighton game, the Palmerton Football Parents Club is collecting toys for Lehighton at tonight’s Palmerton-Jim Thorpe game, alongside its food drive for the Christian Action Council of Palmerton Area Churches. Collier said the Boatyard Bar & Grill, 251 Canal St., is holding a benefit ride for the toy drive Nov. 21. Registration runs from 10 to 11 a.m.