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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 convenient points" — and there were thirty such cisterns before the erection of the standpipe, deep enough, the citizens were assured, that "no steam fire engine can make any perceptible diminution in the depth." The Rivers section of this history carries the water works whole — the 1844 dam and the race, the municipal supply, and the city's present nine well fields of groundwater; what belongs here is the fire side of that record, and it turns on a single winter's work in 1873.
The standpipe: The standpipe's raising is the best-documented single feat in the department's history, and Brown tells it whole. The contract was let to Alexander Staples. The two-hundred-foot pipe was raised in one piece: its sections were fastened together and made watertight lying on the ground, drawn up by pulleys of Staples's own making from a base casting that weighed seven and a half tons. The raising began 15 November 1873; by Christmas Day the work was completed and the river water turned in; brick walls around the pipe were built the following year, and the feat was reported across the country and in Europe. The department then tested the pressure in public, and the test became the city's favorite fire story. J. M. Studebaker wagered Leighton Pine a cow that the standpipe pressure could not drive him from his building's tower; the judges were Edwin Nicar, John C. Knoblock and Caleb Kimball, and Schuyler Colfax stood in the tower with the principals. The department attached its hose to the hydrant and drove Studebaker down. Pine auctioned the cow again and again for the poor — $300 realized — and when the butcher Bleem cut off its tail, the tail proved to have been fastened on for a joke, a bob-tailed cow; the tail itself was auctioned for $45 more for charity. Colfax, speaking at the Studebaker works that Christmas Day, gave the works their meaning: the water works, "from the experiments this morning, seem sure to render efficient fire protection." On 23 February 1874 a grand review of the fire department and inspection of the new stand pipe and water works system was held, with firemen and fire committees from neighboring cities invited.
Artesian water: River water gave pressure but not purity, and the fire supply followed the domestic supply underground. The water works' first superintendent, Everett L. Abbott — the E. L. Abbott whom Farr's 1883 directory lists as superintendent under the water works commissioners — sank a driven well about a hundred and ten feet deep near the pumping station and struck pure artesian water that rose to the surface. Well after well followed in that locality, thirty-four six-inch wells or more; reservoirs were built, the river water was turned off, and the standpipe and mains filled, in Howard's phrase, with "the purest water in the state." A second station at the foot of North Michigan Street added thirty-seven more wells, and a third station followed. By 1907 over eighty miles of water mains had been laid. The business men's leaflet of that year puts the fire figures precisely: 850 fire hydrants, eighty-three miles of water mains, one hundred and twenty-two artesian wells, three pumping stations with a daily capacity of 24,000,000 gallons, the water "forced throughout the city by standpipe pressure." The standpipe itself, Brown adds in 1920, had by then been partly superseded by a six-million-gallon reservoir east of the North Pumping Station, fed by one hundred deep driven wells, though it still furnished part of the city's pressure.
Bells, then boxes: The alarm course begins with bells. Farr's 1883 directory prints the department's "Fire Alarm Signals" over Chief A. B. Culver's name, and the page is a complete picture of a bell-and-box city. Numbered alarm boxes stood at named corners — among them Jefferson and St. Louis streets, Water and Emrick, Michigan and Washington, Main and Marion, South and Fellows, Lafayette and Division, Chapin and Dunham, and at the office of O'Brien's Varnish Works. The first man to reach a house went to the indicator, read the number of the box pulled, gave a general alarm on his bell by rope, then rang the bell according to the number shown, repeating it four times. A general alarm, when all companies were wanted, was ten successive strikes repeated three times at the Central station, each hose house bell taking it up after the Central bell ceased its first round. The system spoke to the water works too: two strokes from the box nearest the fire meant more pressure was wanted, four strokes meant shut the pressure off at the pump house. No bells were to be rung for meetings or any purpose but fire, and the Central bell struck seven o'clock every evening to test the apparatus. The telegraph succeeded the bells on a dated act: on 7 August 1882, Howard records, the Gamewell Fire Alarm system was adopted. By 1907 the business men's leaflet could list "Gamewell fire and police alarm systems" among the city's assets — the police alarm, the patrol call box, standing beside the fire alarm on the same wires' principle.
Sources:
- Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 1 — the thirty covered cisterns; the water works narrative (Abbott's artesian well, the thirty-four wells, the second and third stations, eighty miles of mains); the grand review of 23 February 1874; the Gamewell adoption of 7 August 1882; Colfax's Christmas Day speech.
- John A. Brown, The Story of South Bend (1920), Chapter XI — the standpipe's raising (Staples's contract, the one-piece lift, 15 November to Christmas Day 1873) and the pressure-test wager whole; the 1920 reservoir and standpipe state.
- W. L. Farr, South Bend City Directory (1883) — the "Fire Department" listing (A. B. Culver, chief engineer), the Water Works Commissioners (E. L. Abbott, superintendent), and the "Fire Alarm Signals" page signed by Chief Culver, read first-hand.
- South Bend business men's leaflet, reprinted in Howard (1907), vol. 1, "Sec. 7" — 850 hydrants, 83 miles of mains, 122 artesian wells, three pumping stations at 24,000,000 gallons daily, and the Gamewell fire and police alarm systems.