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Fire & Safety · the Fire Department, the Police, and the Ambulance
South Bend fought its first fires with buckets passed hand to hand from the nearest well, and for its first two decades it had no organization to fight them with at all. What it built, between 1853 and 1887, was first a set of volunteer companies that were half fire brigade and half civic society — they paraded, they competed at tournaments, and they were thanked by resolution of the council — and then, in a single deliberate act in the autumn of 1886, a paid department modeled on Kalamazoo's, which has now served the city for a hundred and forty years. The same decades gave the city its standpipe, its artesian water, its Gamewell alarm boxes, and its first uniformed policemen. This section keeps the institutions: the fire service whole, the police service as an institution, the ambulance's long road from a police wagon and an undertaker's contract to a fire-based EMS division that is now the larger half of the fire department's work, and the names of the firefighters and officers the two departments themselves record as their dead.
The bucket town and the volunteer companies
1853–1886 · BEFORE THE PAID DEPARTMENT
The bucket brigade: Before there was any organization, there was the bucket line. Brown's 1920 history of the city describes the first state of things plainly: every family had a well and a cistern, and when a building was on…
The insurance record: two mutuals
1836–1877 · THE COUNTY INSURES ITSELF
The first insurance company: The bucket town insured itself almost as soon as it was platted. In 1836, Howard's county history records, leading citizens of the town took a prominent part in organizing the first insurance company…
The paid department: organized 26 November 1886
1886–1920 · FROM VOLUNTEERS TO A CAREER SERVICE
The Kalamazoo plan: The change was studied before it was made. On 26 July 1886 a committee sent out to examine paid fire departments in other cities reported in favor of the system in operation in Kalamazoo, and recommended for…
The stations: the roster, 1887 to the present eleven
1887–2026 · HOUSES BUILT, MOVED, CLOSED, AND KEPT
The first houses: The paid department's first building for Company No. 1 stood on the north side of LaSalle Avenue west of Michigan Street, where the downtown South Shore station later stood. The department's headquarters moved…
Water and the alarm: cisterns, the standpipe, and the Gamewell boxes
1873–1907 · WHAT THE FIREMEN FOUGHT WITH, AND HOW THEY WERE CALLED
Thirty cisterns: The first engineered water supply for fire was storage, not pressure. "Another step taken at an early day," Howard writes, "was the securing of a sufficient supply of water by constructing covered cisterns at…
The great fires, from the firemen's side
1871–1885 · THE RESPONSE RECORD
The fires live elsewhere: The fires themselves — the Studebaker works fires of June 1872, 24 August 1874 and 1885, with their losses and their rebuilding — are told as events in the Major Events section of this history, and the…
The fallen: eight names at Seitz Park, and the department's memorial roll
2004–2026 · THE DEPARTMENT REMEMBERS ITS OWN
The Seitz Park memorial: In 2004 the South Bend Fire Department unveiled its memorial at Seitz Park, on the river below the Jefferson Boulevard bridge, honoring the firefighters of the department who died in the line of duty. The…
The police: constables, marshals, and the uniformed department
1831–2026 · THE INSTITUTION
The line's beginning: The chiefs' succession — the marshals and the chiefs of police, name by name — is carried in the Public Servants section of this history and is pointed to, not retold; this entry keeps the institution…
The ambulance: from the police wagon to the EMS Division
1907–2026 · THE LONG ROAD TO FIRE-BASED EMS
A police ambulance: The first ambulance in this record is the police department's. The business men's leaflet of 1907, reprinted in Howard's history, lists a "Police ambulance system" among the city's assets, beside the Gamewell…
The two departments as they stand
NOVEMBER 2026 · VERIFIED FOR THIS HISTORY
Fire: The South Bend Fire Department of November 2026 is a career department of 256 full-time firefighters in four divisions, serving a population of approximately 103,000 — the figures of the department's own page — working from…