FIRES AND FIREFIGHTING

Fire was a serious and ongoing problem in colonial America and the new nation, especially in towns and cities. In an era before zoning regulations, flammable materials were regularly stored near the open fires necessary for heating homes and cooking food. As cities increased in size and density in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, catastrophic conflagrations became common occurrences. A candle in a New Orleans building set off a fire that destroyed over eight hundred buildings in 1788; three years later a Philadelphia fire spread easily through the wooden buildings on Dock Street, while an 1820 fire in Savannah, Georgia, became a conflagration after setting off a cache of gunpowder stored in one building.

Colonial fire codes required homeowners to be in possession of two buckets and prepared to transport water in them to the scene of any nearby fire. By the mid-eighteenth century municipal governments were taking a more active role in controlling fires. New Amsterdam taxed the citizenry to pay for chimney inspectors starting in 1646. In 1718 Boston citizens organized the first American volunteer fire company, complete with a small hand-operated pump fire engine, and uniforms for its members. In 1736 Benjamin Franklin organized, publicized, and participated in a Philadelphia volunteer fire company, setting

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a standard for the participation of civic leaders in volunteer firefighting followed by George Washington, Aaron Burr, and Thomas Jefferson, among others. Fire companies were patriotic hotbeds in the 1777s, as firemen in cities including New York, Boston, and Philadelphia transformed their shared obligation to the preservation of public safety and order into active and outspoken support for the Revolution.

By the early nineteenth century, every American city was protected by volunteer fire companies, organized around small hand-operated fire engines, under the loose control of a municipal overseeing organization. Rural areas were also served by volunteer fire companies. All firefighting in the new nation was conducted by volunteers: paid fire departments were instituted only in the middle of the nineteenth century. Baltimore, for example, had three volunteer fire companies in 1790, six in 1800, and seventeen by 1843, and close to eight hundred active members in the 1830s. Philadelphia had seventeen volunteer companies by 1790. Early fire companies were selective in their membership and combined social activities with firefighting, including visits to firemen in other cities. One of the most notable characteristics of volunteer fire companies in the early nineteenth century was the occupational heterogeneity of their membership. Clerks, skilled laborers, and merchants fought fires side by side. Fire companies also provided early social services, including some of the first public lending libraries. Firehouses contained rooms for public use, and as early as 1792 fire departments set up widow and orphan funds to support dependents of injured or killed firemen. Volunteer firemen were not paid salaries but were absolved from jury and militia duty, and received an important public tribute and prestige for their actions. This prestige motivated firefighters to become active and outspoken in the Revolution, and sustained them in their belief that their public service revealed their civic virtue.

See alsoCity Growth and Development .

bibliography

Carp, Benjamin L. "Fire of Liberty: Firefighters, Urban Voluntary Culture and the Revolutionary Movement." William and Mary Quarterly 58 (October 2001): 781–818.

Greenberg, Amy S. Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Hazen, Margaret Hindle, and Robert M. Hazen. Keepers of the Flame: The Role of Fire in American Culture, 1775–1925. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Amy S. Greenberg