It seemed like a good idea at the time. As the Madison Hose
Co. No. 1, the town’s first volunteer fire department,
prepared to celebrate its 100th anniversary this past summer,
Fire Chief Bob Gerard set out to document each piece of the
company’s apparatus, past and present. “I thought it
would be a simple job – photos of each piece of equipment,
photos of former engines with a description of where they had
gone, some history about each piece. That was all I planned. I
was wrong. The project quickly expanded and so did the amount of
work and number of hours,” Gerard said.
The result, however, is a compilation of photographs, reprinted
news articles, and a connecting narrative that tells the story of
the volunteer fire department for the first time.
“Basically, I started with two typewritten sheets of
department history written in 1965 and a document written at an
earlier unknown date,” he recalled. Before long he was
compiling information from several sources–documents from
the Charlotte L. Evarts Memorial Archives, old news stories, the
departments own records.
He explained in the book’s introduction, “Several
hundred newspaper articles provided by (the archives) were the
reason for expanding the scope of this book.” Gerard became
fascinated with the history, a history that reflects both the
volunteer department and the small Connecticut town it served.
“And as I tried to trace where our former trucks had gone, I
continued to find new information. It made this project exciting
to put together. As word got out about what I was doing, more
people came forward with more photos and stories,” Gerard
said.
The project took over every free hour of his time, every evening
after work and every weekend from late March until mid-August.
“Fortunately there were a lot of rainy weekends.”
During those months, he said in the book’s introduction,
“I looked through stacks of photos and albums, scanning the
best into the computer and adding new digital photographs taken
by myself or others. The computer file that contains the scans
and photos contains more than 730 color and black and white
images.” At 112 pages, with 182 color and black and white
photographs and 27 reprinted historical news articles, the book
“is not even 25 percent of what could be written as a
department history … Perhaps sometime in the future more
detailed stories could be put down on paper for future
generations,” Gerard said.
Today Madison residents can step back into 1907 by buying this
book. (Box) Madison Hose Co. No. 1: Apparatus & Firehouse
History, 1907-2007, A Century of Volunteers ($20) can be
purchased through the Charlotte L. Evarts Memorial Archives at
the Memorial Town Hall, online at MadisonHose1@aol.com, or by
stopping at the firehouse on the Boston Post Road any Sunday
morning from 8 a.m. to noon.