Scott Township - Allegheny County Station 255
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161 Vanadium Road
Bridgeville PA 15017-3025
Business Phone 412-221-3497
Fax 412-221-3990
Hall Rentals 412-221-9073
e-Mail bhvfd255@yahoo.com
January 25, 2009
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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 on Montgomery Avenue) during the day, and “Bridgeville 139-M” (Chief Ringel's home) at night.
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 S 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…" would “bring this vicinity in close relationship with the South Hills…” This "new connecting highway" is the road that we know today as Vanadium Road. Most of the approximately 750 residents of Bower Hill still worked locally and the community was still close. The fire department was very much the community center.
| Notes Credits | 1924 1925 | 1925 1941 | 1941 1945 | 1945 1957 | 1957 1967 | 1967 1973 | 1973 1974 | 1974 1982 | 1982 1992 | 1992 1999 | 1999 2006 | 2006 Today |