The iron company's engine and the volunteer companies

1844–1904 · THE VOLUNTEER TOWN

The Tiger, 1844: Mishawaka's first fire engine was bought to protect a factory, not a town. In 1844 the St. Joseph Iron Company purchased a hand pump engine, "The Tiger," for its works on the river — the works around which the town itself was then still assembling. The men who operated the pump organized themselves, by 1848, as the Mishawaka Mechanics Fire Company No. 1: a 43-man crew with a full slate of company officers — captain, foreman, assistant foreman, treasurer, clerk, hose master and assistant hose master — the form of the nineteenth-century volunteer company, half fire brigade and half civic society, that the National Register nomination for Fire Station No. 4 preserves from the company's own record. The town's first Chief Fire Warden was Harrison Bement.

The Rescue and the second company: In May 1860 the town bought a new hand engine, "The Rescue," for $1,000, with hose and a hose cart — the first engine in the record bought as the town's own rather than the iron company's. In 1866 a second company organized as the Rescue Engine Company, and the two-company volunteer establishment carried Mishawaka's fire protection for the rest of the century: hand engines, hose carts, and men who drilled, paraded, and turned out from their shops and benches when the bell rang.

The volunteer chief: The volunteer department's last chief was also the paid department's first. Amos Williard — born in Penn Township on 1 April 1862, brought to Mishawaka at fifteen, five years a well-driller, five years in a pulp mill, ten years a department foreman at Dodge Manufacturing — had, in Timothy Howard's 1907 biography of him, "served as chief of the volunteer department" in its early days, and when the paid department was organized he "was made its first chief." His whole course is carried in the paid-department entry below; he is named here because the succession he embodies — volunteer chief to paid chief, in one man — is the hinge of Mishawaka's whole fire history.

What the record does not hold: The volunteer era's own paper — company minute books, drill and parade records, the rolls beyond the 43 names of 1848 — is not in the record reached, and no volunteer-era fire death is recorded in it either; the fallen entry below carries that test whole. The settling sources are the company records if they survive, and the Mishawaka City Council Records 1845–1977 at the Hesburgh Libraries, Notre Dame, the archive Government's pass identified for the city's nineteenth-century paper generally.

Sources:

1. National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places registration form, Mishawaka Fire Station No. 4 (2319 Lincolnway East), Section 8 — the Tiger purchased 1844 by the St. Joseph Iron Company; the Mishawaka Mechanics Fire Company No. 1 organized by 1848, its 43-man crew and officers; Harrison Bement, first Chief Fire Warden; the Rescue bought May 1860 for $1,000 with hose and hose cart; the Rescue Engine Company organized 1866.
2. Timothy E. Howard, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, vol. 2 (Lewis Publishing, 1907), biography of Amos Williard — his Penn Township birth 1 April 1862, his trades, and his service as chief of the volunteer department before the paid organization.