{"id":17097,"date":"2025-03-23T06:00:29","date_gmt":"2025-03-23T10:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/?p=17097"},"modified":"2025-03-30T17:12:09","modified_gmt":"2025-03-30T21:12:09","slug":"cincys-fire-fighting-heritage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/cincys-fire-fighting-heritage\/","title":{"rendered":"Cincy’s Fire Fighting Heritage"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I once ate dinner here. It was sometime in the 1980s. The company I worked for held a banquet for a sales conference here, and we were all allowed to tour the museum before the meal. I recall that I found the Cincinnati Fire Museum<\/a> quite interesting at the time, but for some reason gave those memories the better part of four decades to fade. During Saturday’s visit, I did find a few pieces of equipment to be somewhat familiar, but I don’t really remember anything about the layout of the museum and have a hunch it has changed more than a little since I was here.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>Steps — or for adventurous youngsters, a pole — lead to a lower level where the oldest items in the museum are on display. The city’s first fire engine has been lost to history, but its second survives. It is a pumper built by William C. Hunnerman of Boston in 1816. With a crew of twelve, it could throw water up to 133 feet. The massive drum was Cincinnati’s fire alarm from 1808 to 1824. After the city became too big for the drum to be heard by all, a bell took over, and the drum fell on hard times, which included a period of being used as an oat bin before someone recognized its importance and started to take better care of it. Bored-out logs like the one here were once common components in city water systems. When firemen reached the scene of a fire, they might drill a hole in the nearest pipe to access the water, then plug and mark it for possible reuse in the future. The name “fire plug” has outlived wooden pipes and hand drills by a bunch.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>Before the middle of the nineteenth, things called fire engines were merely pumps that were usually mounted, almost always accompanied by some sort of tank, on wheels. Manpower pulled the engines to fires, and manpower operated the pump once they arrived. In 1853, Shawk and Latta, a Cincinnati company, developed the first practical steam pump for fighting fires. Cincinnati soon gained a reputation as a supplier of firefighting equipment. The horse-drawn fire engine (rear view here<\/a>) was built in 1884 by the Ahrens (later Ahrens-Fox) Fire Engine Company, who had obtained the Latta patents in 1868.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>At almost exactly the same time that steam power was dramatically changing firefighting equipment, an equally dramatic change was occurring with the firefighters. Boston began paying some of its firefighters in 1679. Cincinnati went further in 1853 and is considered to have established the nation’s first fully paid fire department. In 1873, Cincinnati firefighters were forbidden from holding other jobs, making them truly professional.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>Closing things out is a pair of twentieth-century Ahrens-Fox fire engines. The chain-driven Model M-4 was delivered to Cincinnati’s Company 13 in 1918. The 1958 cab forward Model ECB is the last fire engine ever produced by Ahrens-Fox. It was retired in 1981.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I once ate dinner here. It was sometime in the 1980s. The company I worked for held a banquet for a sales conference here, and we were all allowed to tour the museum before the meal. I recall that I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27],"tags":[60,38,19],"class_list":["post-17097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-attraction","tag-cincinnati-ohio","tag-history","tag-museum"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1WE0S-4rL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17097"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17112,"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17097\/revisions\/17112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}