Many times each day, sirens blare out in Cecil County as volunteers dash straight for a nearby firehouse. Within minutes, emergency vehicles, sirens screaming and lights flashing, rush out of a station en route to a blazing inferno, a serious accident, or some other emergency.
This scene has been happening here for centuries. Many times, it was a cold Maryland night when the cry of “fire” echoed through the darkness; on other occasions, it was a sweltering Eastern Shore day. Whatever the case, people rushed to the firehouse, and then down the street they came with their engine.
These days, fire companies operate sixteen stations. The incorporated towns and Hack Point have had facilities for a long time, and as the county grew in recent years, companies opened stations in Woodlawn, Conowingo, South Chesapeake City, and Calvert areas.
These structures have an impressive legacy. Some started as simple sheds to quarter buckets, ladders, and perhaps a creaky old hand-pumper. Grander municipal structures for steam engines appeared later, and today metal-and-steel stations await the next alarm.
A Firehouse for Port Deposit
Port Deposit was discussing the need for a central place to store firefighting machinery in the 1860s, a time when men hooked ropes to apparatus and towed it to fires. “Two engines, which “in days gone by” had saved the town from calamity, were scattered about, reels were in a lumberyard, and hose was in a warehouse, a correspondent told the Cecil Whig.
One of those creaky old pumpers helped on the 83rd Anniversary of American Independence (July 4, 1859), when soon after midnight rolled across the river town, the ringing of bells and the startling cry of fire alarmed people.
This brought about the purchase of an additional machine, the Union of Baltimore, which cost $525, the Whig reported. Residents also busied themselves with organizing two fire companies, the Friendship and the Union, and there was talk about erecting an engine house.
Almost a decade later (1868), Eli Sentman finished building a “combined town hall, public school and Masonic Hall.” The engine room was on the first floor, and for “evildoers and night prowlers,” there was a town lockup “ready to receive unwilling occupants,” according to the Cecil Democrat.
Elkton’s Firehouse
In Elkton, what some called an “engine house” had been built on North Street to house the town’s first hand pumper in the late 1820s. In 1890, the town got around to building a municipal building at the cost of $2,973. Until then, the lone public property had been the old shed that served as an “engine house.”
The new structure, “Council Hall,” a two-story brick building with a bell tower, was turned over to the commissioners in February of the next year. The ground floor quartered the fire department; the upper story had town offices.
Remarkably, only one complaint was heard about the improvement, an Elkton newspaper reported. The “doors were too narrow to allow the new steam engine the town was going to get to come out at full speed,” a young man in the insurance business observed.
It was not too long before the Singerly Fire Company, which was organizing itself at the same time, had the first floor overflowing with equipment. In a town that had relied on stubborn old hand pumpers for over 60 years, two hose carriages, a hook-and-ladder truck and a steam engine packed the floor.
In the twentieth century, steam engines gave way to motorized fire trucks and more fire companies formed. They, too, would erect stations.
However, the Port Deposit and Elkton stations, the county’s two oldest firehouses, served the Water Witch and Singerly fire companies for a long time. Once filled with hose and shiny fire engines, both are quiet now since engines no longer bolt out the door.
For additional Fire Stations Photos, see this album on the Cecil County History Page on Facebook.