Stop 24 – The Department Modernizes

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THE FIRST MOTORIZED FIRE TRUCKS

On April twelfth, nineteen sixteen, the department got its first motorized apparatus: a Kissel Kar combination chemical, hose, and ladder truck, which cost the city one thousand sixty-seven dollars and eighty cents. It started life as a passenger car owned by Henry Schwake, and Robert Kregel rebuilt it into a fire truck.

It didn't work out. The Kissel Kar was underpowered and couldn't carry all the equipment, so the old nineteen-oh-one horse-drawn Seagrave wagon was still doing most of the work. That failure convinced the department to push the city for a real fire truck.

In nineteen nineteen, the city bought a GMC combination chemical and hose truck. It had a four-cylinder, twenty-two-horsepower engine, two chemical tanks, a hundred fifty feet of booster hose, and three ladders. It was the first truck out the door until nineteen twenty-six, and was later sold to the Village of Peru, Nebraska.

THE INTRODUCTION OF PROTECTIVE GEAR

In the early years, firefighters fought fires from outside the building. The goal was to keep the fire from spreading to other buildings.

By the nineteen-twenties, the department began adding early protective gear: helmets, raincoats, rubber boots, smoke masks, and mittens for winter and for protecting skin close to the fire.

But the gear wasn't issued to each volunteer. It stayed on the truck, and whoever got to the fire first grabbed what was there. In the photo of the nineteen nineteen GMC, notice the rubber raincoat and hat worn by the paid firemen.