About My Company
National Hose Company #1 was organized August 1st 1898. As a volunteer fire company to protect life and property. National Hose was excepted by the village board on November 7th 1898.
Our first meeting was called to order on November 14th by the company's first elected president George A. Hartman
Through the early 1900's members of the National Hose assisted in fighting numerous large fires throughout the city.
One of these fires reported as spectacular occured on July 27th 1913 at the Weston Lumber Yard Located in North Tonawanda. According to the City Historian Willard Dittmar, this fire consumed stacked lumber along the waterfront and burned so feirce that large planks of lumber could be seen being lifted into the air by the intense convection currents caused by the flames. the fire burned for three days and four nights and consumed 90 million board feet of lumber before being brought under control by forces that also included the Buffalo and Niagara Falls Fire Departments.
In 1917 the first piece of motorized apparatus assigned to National Hose arrived It was a 750 GPM rated pumper that carried hose and had a water tank that was built by Seagrave
In the early days of the company church bells and a bell atop the fire house were rung to alert volunteers of a fire.
At the inception of National Hose, Firefighters were notified of fire by the blowing of a steam whistle situated above the water works building on "Goose Island".The city was divided into 5 sections and depending on which section the fire was in the employees of the water company would blow the whistle a certain number of times to correspond with the 5 sections.
In the early 1900's the water works building was electrified and the whistle was replaced by an air horn.
Also during this time the city installed a state of the art box alarm systemmanufactured by the Gamewell Corporation.
.The bits of information found here so far are from the 100th Reunion book as I get more time I will add more history thanks. Please note that these are MY personal pages "THIS IS NOT THE COMPANY WEBSITE" that url is. http://www.oocities.org/tfd405/National_hose.html so any broken links here or non company business should be emailed directly to me at tvfd440@hotmail.com