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1833–1849 · THE TOWN DECIDES TO FIGHT FIRE
The petition: The first step toward a fire department in Fort Wayne was taken on 1 March 1833, when fifteen citizens — James Barnett, Samuel Edsall, William N. Hood, Dr. L. G. Thompson, Henry Rudisill, James Daniels, Joseph Morgan, David Rankin, John Forsythe, William H. Henderson, Zenas Henderson, J. B. Bequette, W. C. Porter and Lewis Armstrong among them — petitioned the town trustees to procure hooks and ladders "in order to guard against fire," and to consider compelling every householder in the corporation to keep a fire bucket. Firefighting in the canal-construction town was to be a bucket for every house, a ladder for the town, and every man his own fireman.
The companies of 1833–34: The trustees acted at once, authorizing the "Fort Wayne Fire Company," to be equipped with hooks and ladders. On 2 June 1834 the town went further and formed three companies — an engine company, a hose company and a hook and ladder company — the ladder company to be provided with two twenty-four-foot ladders, two of sixteen feet and one of thirty, made by John Majors, and with hooks of fifteen and twenty feet made by John Brown, the blacksmith. The town that the canal was making — frame buildings, stoves, candles and a floating population of laborers — had acquired the skeleton of a fire service within two years of the canal's groundbreaking.
Fire limits: In 1849 the city council drew the town's first fire limits, within which no wooden structures could be erected: the bounds ran along Main, Barr and Harrison streets and the Wabash and Erie Canal — the wooden town was to stop growing at its commercial heart. The watch that policed the same streets against fire by night is told with the police, below.
Sources:
- B. J. Griswold, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Indiana (Chicago: Robert O. Law Co., 1917), Ch. XXV, "The First Fire Company and Equipment" and "Development of the Department" — the 1833 petition, the 1834 companies, the 1849 fire limits.