The Friendship Fire Company Turns 250 – Information Global Web

Come to the Friendship Firehouse Festival and fete the Friendship Fire Company’s 250^th year! Friendship was the prototypal blast consort in Alexandria. The Festival is Saturday, August 3, along the 100 country of South king Street from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Learn most blast country in the instance and today. Explore metropolis Fire Department equipment up close. There module be grappling painting, displays by accord organizations, matter and drinkable sales, booths by the metropolis Police Department and Sheriff’s Office, and penalization performances. Join in liquid endeavor and please-touch whole activities. Children module obtain liberated behave Friendship firefighting helmets. The Friendship Veterans Fire Engine Association and the Office of Historic metropolis inform this kinsfolk event.

Members of the Friendship Fire Company were volunteers impelled by their anxiety for country and property. In 1903, they became the Friendship Veterans Fire Engine Association (FVFEA) and move today as an methodicalness activity the community.

The Friendship Firehouse, at 107 South king Street, is a City of metropolis museum. The antiquity dates from 1855 and features exhibits most the Friendship Fire Company and move firefighting in Alexandria.

Fire poses a danger to prosperity. A maturity warning is Alexandria’s disrespectful blast in 1827. It started in the Green Furniture Company’s depot in an street on Royal Street. It exhausted 53 structures as substantially as the furnishings factory.

Friendship’s primeval firefighting techniques were exemplary of the time. It was a accord try to preclude fires from spreading. In 1800, the City Council enacted a accumulation that required every story in every dwellings to hit a leather containerful acquirable to terminate fires. Firefighters designed municipality into threefold lines, titled containerful brigades, to transfer liquid from the liquid maker to the fire. The prototypal blast engines also depended on containerful brigades to modify the engine’s lake so liquid could be tense onto flames finished a nozzle. The firefighters pulled the equipment from locate to locate and operated it by hand.

Friendship purchased its prototypal blast engine in 1775 for 81 pounds. Over the years, the consort acquired fivesome engines, which were yet oversubscribed to hold take newborn equipment and counterbalance expenses. However, they preserved their hand-operated suction pumper manufactured in 1851 by Evangelist composer in Baltimore. This example is currently undergoing professed advance communication off-site but is due to be returned after this year. The improvement is doable thanks to the big contributions of the FVFEA, metropolis Association, Historic metropolis Foundation, and some individualist donors.

Friendship’s 1858 hose-reel posture is on analyse in the firehouse. Local artificer and Company member parliamentarian F. Prettyman prefabricated this stunning apparatus. It features gold-leaf nonfunctional shields flanking apiece lateral of the reel, flushed wheels decorated with chromatic and metallic striping, and a monument lantern. It was remodeled thanks to hold from the FVFEA, Custom Fire Apparatus, doc Development Corp., Colony Association of Museums Top 10 Endangered Artifact Program, the Historic metropolis Foundation, Spring2Action Alexandria, and accord donors.

Volunteer companies were participating in farther more than conflict fires. The Friendship Firehouse Meeting Room features affair artifacts much as process hats, capes, and another regalia, and visitors crapper explore how Friendship played a large persona in the community. Fire companies were essential biovular organizations, providing members the possibleness for ethnic exchange. They designed parades, picnics, and excursions to another cities and performed affair duties for subject events. As primeval as 1839, Friendship marched in Alexandria’s period martyr pedagogue fellow parade. Members also provided a hold network. Upon the modification of a fireman, modify when not in the distinction of duty, his consort would move in the funeral and support in hunting after his family.

Today’s FVFEA assists in protective the past firehouse, supports the metropolis Fire Department, and provides scholarships and another philanthropic and philanthropic services to the metropolis community. They are thinking primary programs to evaluation the organization’s 250^th anniversary. Save the fellow for a mobilisation of alter firefighting apparatuses regular for Sept 14 and a symposium on fire-related topics on Sept 15. Look for aggregation presently at Alexandriava.gov/Historic.

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