Fire alarm boxes once a fixture on every corner downtown

LIMA — By the mid-1940s, the city’s fire alarm box system, long ago a source of pride, was deemed “about worthless.”

Although 95 percent of fire alarm calls came in then by telephone, according to Fire Chief Harry Taflinger in a story in a 1942 Lima newspaper, the city needed a new fire alarm box system to keep insurance rates low.

The city would eventually get its new system, a second era of fire alarms; together the two systems covered a century of fire calls in Lima.

The first system dated to 1890, after City Council in 1889 voted to contract with the Gamewell Fire Alarm Telegraph Co., of New York, for the system.

“This improvement, in addition to the new sidewalks, sewerage and betterment of streets during the past year, will place Lima in the front rank of neat, tidy, handsome and healthy cities,” The Lima Daily News wrote Sept. 3, 1889.

By 1910, Gamewell held 95 percent of the fire alarm box market share. The boxes have faded from cities over the past 20 years, but some communities, most notably Boston, maintain the boxes on posts at intersections, still allowing concerned citizens to follow the simple instructions, “For fire pull lever,” and call for the Fire Department by telegraph.

Lima’s first fire alarm system was a bell at the courthouse. The first fire bell arrived around 1840. The iron bell cast in Cincinnati was placed in the belfry of the “new” Allen County Courthouse on Town Square. It arrived by Miami and Erie Canal barge to Delphos.

As the century turn neared, public opinion favored the investment in Gamewell’s system.

“I think it would be a good thing, for we need something to protect us against fire, and that is about the safest way of protecting that I know of,” Mr. J.B. Young, one of the “South Side capitalists,” was quoted in the Sept. 19, 1889, Lima Daily Times.

Once installed, however, approval was not unanimous.

City Council voted in February 1890 to move a fire alarm box from Grace Methodist Episcopal Church at the corner of Kibby and Elizabeth streets after church officials protested, saying “such an act of usurpation has a tendency to degrade Christianity and bring it into disrepute.”

The system stood for decades, until it drew national ridicule. An Oct. 1, 1944, headline blared: “55-year-old fire alarm system anonymously cited as horrible example of poor distribution.”

A fire alarm manufacturer had published a map of Lima, without naming the town, as an example of poor distribution and inadequate coverage, with the following caption: “Is this proper protection for the citizens in these sections? What chance has the average person in this city to find a fire alarm box when he needs one?”

The National Board of Fire Underwriters had also called the system “a present condition of disrepair and unreliability.”

And so, Lima got to work. New Fire Chief Walter L. Hydecker shut down the system in 1946 and two years later held a ceremony at the intersection of High and Elizabeth streets to show off the new state-of-the-art Gamewell system.

Mrs. Eugene Porter, of 636 Mt. Holyoke Ave. pulled the lever to sound the first alarm at ceremonies at the intersection. Forty seconds later three pieces of equipment from two fire stations arrived at the corner.

At the August 1948 ceremony, L.M. Mannon, secretary of the Better Business Bureau, sounded like his counterparts from decades previously, listing the new system along with improved hospitals and enlarged raw water supply as city progress.

The city spent $35,000 on the new system, which operated until 1990.

Long after telephones ruled the day as emergency communication and even beyond the advent of the 9-1-1 system, the boxes remained in Lima. A postal worker called in the Lima Central High School fire on a North Street box, said Sean Carpenter, a current firefighter, union official and one of the caretakers of the Lima Firefighters Memorial Museum.

One of the museum’s displays features a Gamewell box and post and the original chart showing all the numbers assigned to boxes and their locations. For example, the last box put on the system, at Veterans Memorial Civic Center, had the number 5141. If pulled, the box would send this telegraph message to Central Fire Station: five dots, a space, one dot, a space, four dots, a space, then one dot.

Firefighters would know the location of the box, but not precisely the fire. Hopefully the person who did the pulling would still be there to direct, or officers would follow their eyes and noses.

The Lima Firefighters Memorial Museum is located at the corner of East Elm and Shawnee streets, near Lincoln Park. To schedule a tour, call the chief’s office at 419-221-5264.