| As is so often the case after a crisis,
city officials met after this disaster and agreed to engage the City of
Lockport in a plan creating both a water works system and fire
department. Mayor McDonald, was appointed as the first chief, and
he wasted no time in designing a system of fire protection that called
for the placement of hose carts in three ends of town. Each of
these three separate stations would respond to a call after the special
whistle code denoted which of the three was to be summoned. Each
station had volunteers assigned to it who lived or worked in the area,
and it was their duty to cover and to react when called upon. The
birth of the Lockport Volunteer Fire Department thus has become a
reality founded out of the ashes of the city's worst tragedy.
The records of history tell us the city's
first department was called Lockport Fire Department, Inc. In its
earliest days it depended solely on volunteer help. The first
full-time employee with the department was hired in 1920. Pat
O'Brien was his name, and it was his job to tend to the horses and
maintain the hose cart. The fire department was then housed in the
Hyland Building located immediately east of the alleyway on Ninth
Street. Mr. O'Brien did stay in this facility 'round the clock,
but when a few months lapsed and city officials concluded the job was
not demanding enough, his job duties were expanded to include collecting
the city's garbage as well.
I'd like to refer you to the photograph
showing some of the volunteers pictured in the August 10, 1904 caption.
These men deserve recognition because most of them were the backbone of
the volunteer force from the earliest days well into the 1920's.
The list of names will include those who we can identify in the picture
first followed by other prominent members not shown here: Reading
right to left we have: #2 George Adelmann; #4Frank Miller; #6John
Mackin; #7 Ed Sloan, Jr.; and #14 Peter Diehl. Other volunteers
would include Joe Drick, M.M. Ward, and Michael M. Borolen. These
early volunteers certainly had to overcome many obstacles when
responding to a fire, for they depended on hand-drawn or horse-drawn
carts and second-hand tools and hose. Even though it is
acknowledged that the Lockport Volunteers had one of the finest team of
black horses in the area, this factor didn't compensate the volunteers
much when they had to do battle with the fire itself. Prior to the
early 1920's, the fund simply weren't available to provide the volunteer
department with first rate equipment. This period of 1895-1920 was
one where we witnessed the establishment and growth of a volunteer
organization, the employment of the first full-time employee in the
department, the settling of fire equipment into permanent stations, and
the recognition and meaning of what adequate protection meant to the
community at-large.
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