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Tested November 2026
One great fire stands in the town's early record, and no fire has a department's-eye narrative in any source reached. The planing mill of the Cole Brothers, built in 1866, burned in 1871 — the Story of North Liberty section's record — and was reincorporated in 1873 as the North Liberty Manufacturing Company, making wagons and buggies; the fire predates any organised department by decades and prints as a loss in the industrial record, not a firefighting story. Beyond it, no conflagration, no named fire run, and no department's account of a working fire in this town was found in the sources opened; the town was never wiped or half-wiped by fire in any carrier reached, a negative that is itself a fact about a wooden nineteenth-century town. The department's run record in the modern era — the registry's hundred-thirty runs a year — is carried above at its carrier's strength.