Looking Back

When you heard someone yell “FIRE!”, you dropped what you were doing and joined the effort to put out the fire. That usually involved a fire brigade of buckets of water passed up and down a line of volunteers, with the water coming from the closest well or from the creek!

Fighting a fire was more than just putting out the flames.

Lives may be at risk and people had to jump out of windows or climb down ladders.

If a business caught on fire, volunteers would pull merchandise from the building to try and save the merchant’s livelihood.

In the big fire of 1904, Hartsville’s worse, after the fire, Main Street was full of merchandise pulled from the stores. And, River Street, where several homes were also consumed by flames, household furniture and personal possessions were in the street.

But, the biggest task facing the volunteer fire fighters was to keep the fire from spreading!

Because most downtown buildings were of wood construction or had wooden roofing shingles, they were vulnerable to sparks produced by the original fire.

That is why our 1904 fire was so disastrous…the fire spread.

We quote from an article in a Nashville paper, “For three hours a fierce fire raged in this little town today, causing the greatest loss of any conflagration in its history. The total loss is estimated at about $60,000. The handsome new courthouse, ten business houses, the principal hotel, two livery stables and five residences were destroyed, the fire making ruins of an area of four or five acres in the central part of town. The insurance is very light on account of the high rates charged. The town had a disastrous blaze several years ago, when a large loss was incurred by insurance companies. The courthouse was then destroyed and other buildings in the same section devastated today. The rates of insurance are from 3 to 6%, and the town has no facilities for fighting fires.”

Our first courthouse, built in 1874, had burned in the earlier fire mentioned in the article. But, it had been rebuilt on its original rock foundation. That is why the article refers to it as “the handsome new courthouse”.

Note also, the last line of the article, “the town has no facilities for fighting fires.”

A history of fires, plus the lack of an organized fire department, led to high insurance rates. The expense of fire insurance led many merchants to only insure a part of their inventory, which in this case turned out to be a bad business decision.

Thus, it was that in 1924, high insurance rates and the continued threat of fires, led city and county officials and local businessmen to decide to do something.

They organized the Hartsville Volunteer Fire Department!

With the invention of gas powered automobiles, the new group was able to purchase a fire engine that didn’t need to be pulled by a team of horses!

The new piece of fire fighting equipment was a Model-T Ford.

It carried three 35 gallon tanks.

There were no fire hydrants in town, so the engine had to both carry water and the mechanism to force the water out of the tanks. In the old days, men had to hand operate a pump on the engine to push the water into the fire hose.

The new fire engine used a combination of chemicals to cause a reaction. Soda and acid were poured into the water tanks, with the result that a gas was formed filling up the space in the tank and forcing the water out…high tech for its day and time!

The first fire the new volunteers and their engine rushed to was on Church Street…where the men discovered that they had neglected to purchase one critical piece of equipment…a fire hose!

Fortunately, the old tried and true method of filling buckets and using a line of volunteers in a fire brigade, put out the fire and a hose was ordered!