Stop 41 – Retiring Engines

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Over the department's long history, fire engines have been retired from time to time and replaced with newer, more capable ones. Some were sold to other fire departments in the area. Many were traded in to the company building the new engine. Any useful equipment was taken off first, along with the dedication plaques, like the two you see here.

The top plaque came from the nineteen sixty-one Seagrave pumper, delivered in September of that year when Otto Berthold was Fire Chief. It cost about twenty-four thousand six hundred dollars and was retired in nineteen eighty-five. The second came from the nineteen seventy-three Sutphen eighty-five-foot aerial tower, which cost a hundred twenty-six thousand dollars and was retired in two thousand five.

The rural department's first truck, the nineteen sixty-five Ford pumper, was retired in nineteen eighty-four and sold to the Peru rural fire department.

Of all the engines the department has owned, only two were kept: the nineteen twenty-six and nineteen thirty-eight Seagraves. And they're both right here in the museum.