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Stop 20 – Building From the Ashes

Building From the Ashes

00:00 / 01:54

THE 1901 ENGINE HOUSE FIRE

At three-thirty in the morning on December fourteenth, nineteen-oh-one, the tables were turned on the fire department. Frank Hoke discovered that the City Hall and Engine House itself was on fire.

He tried to sound the alarm, but the fire burned through the bell rope after just a few taps. He finally woke the paid driver, White Handley, who got out with one team of horses and the fire wagon, and they soon had water on the fire. Police Officer George Davis freed the second team and saved most of Handley's belongings. The only prisoner in the city jail was let out too.

Within half an hour, the building was a mass of flames, and the bell tower fell in. The city treasurer's safe crashed through to the engine room. The Button steam engine was trapped when the floor above collapsed on it, but that same fallen floor protected it from the flames.

It was a brutal night. Loose electrical wires shocked several firemen, and it was so cold that Craig Poling, holding the nozzle, badly froze his hands and ears. The building was a total loss, insured for only twenty-five hundred dollars.

BUILDING THE NEW ENGINE HOUSE

Rebuilding was slow. The insurance money wasn't enough, and some people wanted to move the fire station to a more central spot. Several citizens offered to pay for a one-story building at Tenth Street and First Corso.

Fire Chief Mike Bauer wanted a two-story building at the original location, and he wouldn't back down. The argument between the department, the City Council, and the town dragged on for two years. In September of nineteen-oh-three, Chief Bauer even got a court order stopping the city from finishing a one-story building on the old site.

In the end, the Council gave in. The new two-story City Hall and Engine House was completed on July first, nineteen-oh-four, almost three years after the fire.

The nineteen forty-two photo shows the whole department lined up in front of that building. The hand-painted postcard shows the nineteen-oh-one Seagrave fire wagon parked out front.