Stop 3 – Otoe Hook and Ladder Company Number One

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THE COMPANY

The bucket brigade that A. F. Mollring started in eighteen fifty-six carried on until eighteen fifty-seven, when the Otoe Hook and Ladder Company Number One was organized, with Mollring as its foreman. The company was named for the Otoe people who lived in this area.

In eighteen sixty-one, the company bought a tub pump. Water was poured into the tub, and a hand pump forced it through a hose aimed at the fire.

At first, the men used any wagon they could find to haul their gear. Later they had a supply wagon, a Peter Schuettler farm wagon fitted out with homemade ladders, pike poles, axes, leather buckets, and oil lanterns.

The large photograph shows the company lined up in front of the City Hall and Engine House in eighteen eighty-seven, with St. Mary's Church in the background. Mike Bauer is there, in a derby hat, as Chief of the Fire Department.

THE HAND-PUMP FIRE ENGINE

The first fire engine the department owned was a Deming four-man, end-stroke hand pump. Four men worked the pumping arms up and down, driving a piston pump that pushed water through a hose about an inch and a half wide. The water came from whatever was nearby: stock tanks, streams, and later the city's cisterns.

The engine on display here is an eighteen-ninety Deming. The department bought it as a backup, to replace equipment lost in the nineteen-oh-one engine house fire. How far it could throw water depended on the strength and stamina of the four men on the handles. And it still works today.

By the way, what makes a piece of fire apparatus an engine? An engine is any apparatus that can draw water from a source, whether it's powered by hand, by steam, or by a gasoline motor.