By Theo Francis
Daily Record
MORRISTOWN — The fire engines have been gone for more than a year now, but the red
brick firehouse on Market Street still holds a wealth of firefighting history, memorabilia
-— and even the faint whiff of century-old scandal.
In this building, the same two fire companies have made their home since it was built
in the 1870s: a handsome structure strangely divided, with two cellars, two bars, two
stairways and, originally, not a doorway joining them.
On one side of this building, cartoonist Thomas Nast drank with his pals in the
Independent Hose Company during the waning years of the 19th century. On the other, the
Washington Engine Company rebuilt itself after being destroyed by a conspiracy of booze,
greed and arson in the same year the building was built.
Now, with the antiquated Market Street Firehouse likely headed for auction,
"Washies" and "Independents" alike are facing a proposition unknown
for 127 years: They, along with the history that lines the walls and fills the cabinets of
their meeting rooms, might have to find a new home.
"It is going to be a sense of history lost," said fire department Capt. Bob
Taylor, who started as a Washie volunteer.
Though the firehouse has not been in active use since 1996, the volunteers still meet
there.
"We have mixed emotions," Taylor said. "It’s on a one-way street
that opens onto a one-way street, and at rush-hour there’s gridlock. At the same
time, you hate to see the history go."
Market Street was home to firefighters even before the town created its fire department
in 1867, absorbing several of the older independent companies. But in 1870 the town
council paid $2,500 to buy a lot on Market Street and another $3,700 to build the two-bay
firehouse soon after.
Upstairs in the new building was "a fine parlor and reading room, both handsomely
carpeted and furnished in black walnut and green," a Morris Republican article
recounted in 1874. "The rooms wear a comfortable, home-like appearance, and their
fitting up speaks well for the taste of the men."
But 1870 was not a quiet year for Morristown firefighters. The town lived in fear of a
"gang of incendiaries" believed to have burned some 10 to 15 barns during the
previous two years. The arsonists sent thousands of dollars of property up in smoke, even
doing $280 worth of damage to the courthouse. Rewards were offered, to no avail.
"It is impossible to guess where this thing will end," one newspaper writer
lamented after a June 18 blaze. But the end was near.
"For more than two years past," the Jerseyman wrote on Sept. 3, 1870,
"Morristown has been infested with a gang of incendiaries whose operations have been
so extensive as to have excited general alarm, and yet so secretly conducted as to have
defied the utmost efforts of our officers and citizens."
On a Saturday in August, town police Chief John McDavitt — "a sharp, shrewd,
active man, who had previous experience as a detective" — got a tip from an
informant among the arsonists.
He and several other residents staked out the Morris Academy, where 52-56 South St. is
now. At 11 p.m., three young men, armed with kerosene and paper from a local newspaper
office, arrived and set fire to the building’s cellar.
Two were caught immediately. A third ran. Struck by two of the half-dozen bullets fired
at him, the fleeing arsonist was soon tackled by a town councilman in front of the Church
of the Redeemer.
The plot was exposed: A gang of nine or 10 was responsible, headed by "Gibson
Kent, keeper of a saloon in Market Street" — and foreman of the Washington
Engine Company.
Kent, the Jerseyman writes, "generally managed to have the fires take place on
Saturday nights after the boys had been paid off for their week’s work, and when, the
fire was over, drinking and carousing could be kept up at his place until daybreak Sunday
morning."
He would ply his confederates with liquor before sending them out to start the fires,
and each blaze brought him between $100 and $200 in business, the paper said.
Kent and several co-conspirators were convicted and sent to prison, according to a
handwritten 1926 account by Augustus W. Bell, a member of the Independent Hose Company.
The Washington Engine Company was disbanded and not reorganized until May 1872, when it
moved into its half of the split building on Market Street. The Independents had moved in
the year before.
The two companies shared the building in name only. More than stone and wooden walls
divided the members.
"If you look back, you realize you joined a company by your nationality,"
said Jim McGovern, a volunteer captain with the Washington Engine Company. "We were
basically Irish Catholics."
The Independents, for the most part, were Protestants, Taylor said. As religious and
ethnic differences cooled, the building was joined with a central front door, though the
two companies continue mostly separate meetings, social activities and traditions.
"We’re like one country but different states," McGovern said.
In the last decade of the 1800s, the Independents found themselves drinking with Nast,
the artist who first drew a jolly, red-suited Santa Claus, the Republican elephant and the
Democratic donkey.
"Hurrah Boys!" he exults from a massive self-caricature, now in the
Macculloch Hall Historical Museum, celebrating the 1897 centennial of the first Morristown
fire company. "We are 100 years old!" The picture hung for 91 years among the
Independents, collecting cigarette smoke, diesel fumes and even accidental beer splatters
before it was removed and restored in 1988.
But for all its history, the Market Street Firehouse is now woefully obsolete. Union
concerns about the structure’s safety led to an inspection in 1996. The twin engine
bays, built for horse- and human-drawn equipment, are dwarfed by modern engines, the
floors cracked and unable to bear the 15-ton weight of newer trucks. A quarter-million
dollars would be needed to modernize the firehouse.
At 2 p.m. on Dec. 2, 1996, it was vacated, its eight paid firefighters, lockers, cots
and engines moved to the Speedwell Avenue headquarters. Now, most of the rest of the
building’s contents — along with some 40 Washies and 20 Independents — will
follow, if the council follows the recommendation of a town committee and decides to sell
the building.
Moving out of the familiar attic will be "very strange," said 33-year
volunteer Washington Engine Company Secretary Donald Geary, four generations of whose
family volunteered in the firehouse. "If we wind up moving up to the Speedwell Avenue
firehouse, for myself and guys my age, that’s the other side of town."
For now, leather fire helmets adorn one cabinet in the firehouse. Century-old record
books fill another. The brass pole that once carried sleepy firefighters from bunk room to
fire engine lies along one wall, nameplates for fire-engine horses Duke and Prince adorn
another. The safe on the Washie side has not been opened in years, McGovern said.
"There could be $100,000 in there, there could be nothing." An old alarm-box
— one of dozens used before 911 — is on the Washie side; both companies kept the
bells and ticker-tape machines that once tapped out code telling firefighters which alarm
was pulled.
"There’s a lot of tradition and history in that firehouse," said Fred
Richards Sr., president of the Independents. "But we’re going to make sure it
gets preserved for the future."
The companies would like to donate their records to the public library, Taylor said.
The rest will go to fire headquarters if the Market Street building is sold. Historic
preservation laws will keep the facade of the Market Street building largely intact.
"It would be nice if the town could make a museum of this," Taylor said last
week, looking through a cabinet of log-books and acknowledging that the town’s
financial problems won’t allow it. "It’s the wrong time, I guess." |
theo@theowire.com