Fire consumed an abandoned, historic warehouse in the center of Greenville on Thursday, the same night presidential hopeful Barack Obama came to town.

More than a half dozen trucks and 50 firefighters responded at 6:30 p.m. after a police officer spotted smoke, authorities said at the scene Thursday night. Turn-of-the-century timbers in a building that stood in what once was the heart of Greenville erupted into flames that shot more than 100 feet into the air.

The smoke plume was visible from Wintergreen school, 5 miles to the south, and the Pitt County Fairgrounds, 5 miles to the north.

The blaze was contained but still burning furiously two hours later.

The fire nearly destroyed what was left of the landmark, which preservationists hoped to salvage for a focal point of west Greenville and center city revitalization.

Lines of water trained on the plant's iconic smokestack and water tower kept the structures from falling on Thursday.

"I'm devastated," said Tom Taft, a Greenville lawyer who purchased the facility in hopes of developing it. "My project manager said the early estimation is nothing is salvageable."

The building had been built by the same contractors and at the same time period as the Rocky Mount Imperial site, which has been restored, Taft said.

"I had my financing lined up," said Taft, who said he was in discussions with people about historic preservation tax credits, prospective tenants and roofers. Schematics for the area from Atlantic to Pitt were being worked up, he said.

Located in "Tobacco Town" off Dickinson Avenue, the three-story plant of the former Imperial Tobacco Company of Great Britain and Ireland Ltd., was once the largest buyer of tobacco on the Greenville market for the export trade, according to research written by local historian Roger Kammerer.

Most of the structure was built in the early 1900s. The company left Greenville in 1978, leaving behind the building covering two city blocks.

Greenville voters in 2004 approved a pair of $5 million bond issues for the redevelopment of west Greenville and the center city. Many hoped the tobacco facility would be a star attraction of the effort.

"It would just be the center point for that district, and a destination place for eastern North Carolina," historian Kammerer said Thursday. "Even with it gone, I understand that all that area has already been bought up by developers."

The plan for restoring the larger district sounds like it still could be very active , Kammerer said.

People involved include doctors, ECU faculty, local businesspeople, "a swath of the local community," he said. "People who like old things."

The next step, he said, wait and see if other owners are still willing to go forward. "There's more buildings to be saved," he said, "but this was the grandest of them all."

The fire's cause was unknown Thursday, although officials considered it suspicious. An investigation will move forward once flames are extinguished, Chief Mike Burton of Greenville Fire-Rescue said.

The fire, coupled with demands placed on authorities by the visit of Obama, required cooperation of many agencies to coordinate response. While Greenville Fire-Rescue fought the fire with all its units, departments from Red Oak, Staton House, Eastern Pines and Winterville helped cover the city's vacant stations and battle the blaze, Burton said. A tanker from Pitt County Schools also carried fuel to the trucks, whose motors must keep running while they pump water.

Extra officers called in to help police handle crowds and traffic associated with Obama — more than 8,000 people turned out for the event about a mile away at Minges Coliseum — allowed police to manage traffic and another crowd that grew near the fire.

"It didn't impact the coverage of the Obama event or this," said Greenville Police Department spokesman Cpl. Kip Gaskins. "With the mutual aid agreements that we have, and the extra manpower that we had, they were able to cover both events at the same time without any difficulty."

Crowds gathered nearby as flame and smoke billowed from every window of the structure along with explosions of steam as firefighters water poured water on the fire.

William Clark, who has lived in Greenville his entire life, was among them, watching from the corner of Pitt Street and Dickinson Avenue.

He said he remembers when the area around Dickinson was thriving with at least three tobacco warehouses in the area. He used to drive a truck from Williamston to the Imperial Tobacco Company in the 1950s, he said.

He saw the smoke from Memorial Drive and went to the area to see what was happening.

More than 100 people came and went near the corner where he was standing over the course of an hour. Many were students from East Carolina University.

Lauren Holt, a freshman at ECU, saw the smoke as she left yoga class at the ECU Recreation Center. She said people in the building were talking about the fire and trying to figure out what was going on.

"People were talking about it in class and getting distracted," she said.

Taft was at the Obama event while the building burned.

"Greenville lost an important historic structure," he said. "Probably the most important remaining historic structure."

Michael Abramowitz can be reached at 329-9571 or mabramowitz@coxnc.com; Josh Humphries can be reached at 329-9565 or jhumphries@coxnc.com; Ben Deck can be reached at 329-9585 or bdeck@coxnc.com.