Stop 10 – The 1884 Button Steam Engine

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On September twenty-second, eighteen eighty-four, the City Council ordered a new steam fire engine from the Button Fire Engine Company of Waterford, New York. It was a Fifth Class, single-pump engine that weighed about three thousand pounds and cost twenty-eight hundred dollars. It came to Nebraska City on a railroad flat car on December fourth, eighteen eighty-four, and was named the H. F. Cady, after the mayor.

It was guaranteed to throw water more than two hundred forty feet through a hundred feet of hose, and more than two hundred feet through a thousand feet of hose. It pumped four hundred gallons a minute.

When the department got its first motorized pumper in nineteen twenty-six, the Button retired after forty-two years of service. It went on display at Arbor Lodge State Historical Park until nineteen eighty, and it still works. One photo shows it spraying water at Arbor Lodge in the early two-thousands.

Below, you can see the original purchase papers and a letter from the Button company acknowledging the first payment.