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Early
Years:
1925 - 1941
During
its
first
decades of
service, the Bower Hill Volunteer Fire Department served a community
that was compact and tight-knit. Citizens cared and were involved in the department. Most
of the
population of the community worked either in the mines, at the paint
plant, or
in the steel mill, glass plant or bolt works across the creek in
Collier Township.
The fire department was as much a
community center as a public
safety agency. By 1928, membership had grown from the original 12, to
54. Few records remain of any major fires or incidents from
this
era. Members from this era recounted stories of many small house fires
and fires in some
of the
mine and mill buildings, and at the many gas wells and oil derricks,
and of the yearly flooding of Chartiers Creek.
They
remembered being summoned to calls by the member who took the call
hammering
on the steel tire from a locomotive wheel with a large wooden mallet.
In 1928,
the department got a new 5HP electric siren to replace the locomotive
tire and
mallet. The community was also equipped with city fire alarm call
boxes. Sadly,
no record remains as to what type of boxes these were or where they
were
located. The telephone was the primary means of summoning the
department, at
phone “Bridgeville 30” (department member Morris Abramovitz's general store)
during the day, and “Bridgeville 139-M” (Chief Ringel's home) at night.
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1929 Firemen's "Old Home Week" Fair

1927 Firemen on Montgomery Avenue
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The
firemen were also
improving their
equipment. Apparently, the Model T Ford was proving inadequate for the
service required and the department began searching for a newer, more
capable vehicle. On Thanksgiving
Day, 1926, an
International Model B-3 Chemical and Hose Car replaced the old Ford.
The builder's picture of
this piece
appears
on page 99 of the book American Fire Engines Since
1900 by Walter McCall (Crestline Publishing, 1976). This vehicle
would serve the department for the next 18 years, and this length of
service would become the norm for the department's equipment.
The great
depression saw the
closure of many of the mines that supported the community, and the end
of
passenger train service on the Pittsburgh & West Virginia and the
Pittsburgh, Chartiers & Youghiogheny lines.
(Passenger
service remained on the Pennsylvania Railroad’s line until 1952). The
new
William Flinn
Highway replaced the old Pittsburgh and
Washington Pike as the principal road
to points
north and south of the community. The automobile began to appear in
greater
numbers, but the nearly universal mobility it would later bring was
mostly unrealized,
since many roads remained unpaved and were unsuitable for regular automobile
travel.
A 1929 fire prevention booklet published by the department ends with a
note that residents should
appeal to
the county to pave Montgomery Avenue and that this, along with the
completion
of, “the
new connecting highway from the Pittsburgh - West Virginia viaduct to
the Bower Hill road…” (this "new connecting highway" is the road that
we know today as Vanadium Road) would
“bring this vicinity in close relationship with the South Hills…” Most
of the approximately 750 residents of Bower Hill still worked locally
and the community was
still close.
The fire department remained a center of community support.
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