Stop 23 – After Fifty Years, the Companies Unite

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FORMING THE NEBRASKA CITY VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT

For about fifty years, Nebraska City had three separate fire companies. In April of nineteen-oh-five, they finally came together as one department, the Nebraska City Volunteer Fire Department. Each company kept its own name and members, though.

A committee of Frank Fields, C. M. Hubner, and Ira Goldin was appointed to write a constitution and bylaws, and the formalities were finished in nineteen-oh-eight.

On the right side of the panel, you'll find the members of all three companies in nineteen-oh-one, when Mike Bauer was Fire Chief. See if you recognize any family names.

ANSWERING THE CALL IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

By the late eighteen hundreds, fire bells just weren't loud enough. So the Great Western General Mills, at Thirteenth Street and Eighth Corso, agreed to use its steam whistle as a fire alarm, blowing extra blasts to signal which ward the fire was in. When the mill closed, the steam siren moved to the Morton-Gregson meat packing plant, and in nineteen thirty-two, to the City Water Pumping Station on the river front.

By then, people reported fires by telephone. The operator took the call, then rang the fire station, then called a list of firemen, and then called the pumping station to blow the whistle. The switchboard lights for firefighters were all green.

After World War Two, the city and county put an electric alarm siren on top of the courthouse in nineteen fifty-eight. In May of nineteen sixty-four, the phone company installed a hot line at the fire station. When the duty firefighter picked it up, every volunteer's phone started ringing. And in nineteen eighty-two, that gave way to radio pagers.