Antique Fire Engines Still Answering the Bell : Department Seeking Donations for Further Restoration

In the back of a storage garage behind Fire Station 3 downtown, carefully preserved since 1905, there is a noble experiment in firefighting engineering that failed. Only two examples are thought to have been manufactured.

At the same time, spread out in a corner of the Fire Department’s repair shops in Lincoln Heights are the eviscerated remains of a steam boiler that represent the heart and lungs of the city’s oldest piece of fire apparatus.

Not to worry, though, Capt. Robert DeFeo said, Fire Department mechanics and volunteers will, somehow, figure out how the 1887 coal-burning Amoskeag steam pumper works in time to have the apparatus returned to service by August.

A Link to the Present

These vignettes may seem unrelated. But to the firefighter historian, these vestigial remains of the early days of smoke-eating are an important link to the present. They are a reminder, too, of both how much and how little firefighting has changed in the century since the City of Los Angeles bought its first four Amoskeag steam pumpers and brought its primitive volunteer Fire Department into the 19th Century.

This point is emphasized now because this year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the city’s full-time fire service.

At the headquarters of the Los Angeles County Fire Department in City Terrace, Capt. John Price fires up a 1925 Stutz (by the same company that gave the world the Stutz Bearcat--the Ferrari Testa Rosa of its time) pumper and shakes his head. It, too, is a rare fire engine, one of only three known.

Ignominious Presence

Price backs the Stutz out of a maintenance garage and the first thing a visitor notices is the ignominious presence on its rearboard--the platform on which firemen stand at the back of the apparatus--of a rack full of discarded garments left over from a Christmas clothing drive.

The Stutz is running all right now, Price says, but it has what is called a cone clutch--a variety essentially unknown in motor vehicle technology today. The clutch is worn and replacement parts are essentially impossible to obtain.

Having new ones made specially by a machinist is beyond the means of the donation-funded program that provides for such things so the Stutz faces imminent and final retirement to parade duty next year sometime. Right now, it still appears periodically in fire service competitions where it is fully capable of proving it can squirt water with the best of them.

Aerial ladders may reach 100 feet into the air today and firefighters may use pumpers that pour out 2,000 gallons of water a minute, but the ladders are still ladders and the water still shoots out of hoses, just as it has since the first steam-driven fire pumps came into use more than 150 years ago.

And even in Southern California, with its reputation for denigrating such links to the past, this has not been lost. In Los Angeles County alone, there are at least a dozen antique fire engines and ladder vehicles maintained by modern day fire departments--enough to assemble a credible response to even a large, contemporary fire.

Most of the fire departments involved take pride in the fact that the antiques are kept in fully operational condition. In terms of sheer numbers, the county fire department has the largest complement of ancient and honorable apparatus, with, in addition to the Stutz, two Model-T Ford pumpers, from 1913 and 1920; a 1927 Model-T fire chief’s car currently being restored; a 1930s era Reo pumper (also currently being rebuilt), and a hand-drawn pumper dating to 1853 and a hand-drawn ladder vehicle from about 1900.

This firefighting force would not respond as quickly as its contemporary equivalent and there would be the problem of what to do with a few horses once they got there, but, even now, this tie to the past could acquit itself honorably at its trade.

Permanent Home

Three of the best examples of this are assigned to the city’s Fire Station 3, a new complex of cement block buildings on Temple Street near the Harbor Freeway. The station is the permanent home of the 1887 Amoskeag pumper currently undergoing renovation and repair. It is also the quarters for a 1931 Seagrave hose wagon--a fire truck that looks like a pumper but was built without pumps to transport hose, ladders and firemen.

But the most ungainly and eccentric item of all is the bizarre-looking rig parked along the back wall of the storage garage where the antiques are kept. It is called a Gorter Water Tower and it originally went into service here in 1905 as a horse-drawn apparatus.

In 1910 or 1914 (records are not clear which), as motorized fire engines started to dominate fire services nationwide, the city fitted a chain-operated, front-wheel-drive front end on the Gorter from the American La France fire engine company in Elmira, N.Y., and converted the behemoth into a truck. The power unit had originally been used on a converted steam-driven pumper.

If that sounds odd, here is how the Gorter works:

It arrives at a fire, having responded at an average speed of 12 m.p.h. Lumbering along en route, with its red lights glaring, the Gorter looks a little bit like an oil drilling rig with a boom collapsed on top of the truck bed.

At the fire, the Gorter is hooked up to the combined outputs of two pumpers. The water rushing into the Gorter’s mechanism gives life to a water-powered motor (a sort of paddlewheel-like mechanism inside a metal casing) that raises the boom upright without benefit of any other engine or hydraulic assist. In the middle of the boom is a water pipe that can telescope upward--also using the water engine for power to drive a system of what look like large and elongated bicycle chains that hoist the water pipe straight up into the air.

Fully deployed, the Gorter can then squirt 800 gallons of water a minute onto a fire from a height of 65 feet--with the maneuvering of the huge nozzle, the boom and pipe contraption all controlled from the ground by firemen manipulating the water engine. The maximum height, noted Fire Capt. Jerry Layton of Fire Station 12 in Highland Park--where the Gorter was restored five years ago--was perfectly in scale with the buildings of its day.

The Gorter has actually squirted water in this fashion as recently as 1981. That amazed even some of the people who worked to rebuild it in an unusual, round-the-clock volunteer program in which 58 firemen took turns repairing the Gorter, finishing the whole job in less than three weeks so the Gorter could be entered in an antique fire engine competition. It won.

Firefighter John Shewmake, still assigned to Station 12 and a ramrod in the restoration program, noted that the Gorter developed a large leak in the back of the nozzle during its 1981 squirt and firemen are hesitant to try to rebuild the water pipe mechanism because so little is known about how it works. So the Gorter has probably expressed its last high-pressure jet.

Only two Gorters like the one here are known to have existed. Both were made by a man named Henry Gorter who assembled the first one--and held at least three patents on the water tower’s unique mechanism--in San Francisco a few years before the great earthquake of 1906. Later, when Los Angeles became enamored of what appeared to be a technological breakthrough, the department hired Gorter to come build one, putting him on the payroll as a battalion chief at $150 a month.

But if the Gorter is a lovable monstrosity, it is also testimony to an engineering experiment that didn’t work, agreed Layton, Shewmake and Capt. Richard Jioras, of Station 3. When the Gorter was first operating as a horse-drawn rig, it was even slower than when it was motorized in 1910. That meant, Jioras and Shewmake said, that it was seldom able, even in its heyday, to do what it was designed to do because, by the time the Gorter got to the average fire, things were already so out of hand that the water tower made little difference in the outcome.

“It never was effective, because it was so slow,” Shewmake noted.

The Gorter was also difficult to re-position because its maneuverability relied on water-powered technology. That meant that pumpers had to be hooked to it, generating full pressure, to make any adjustment in the height of the tower or force of its stream. Though the Gorter remained in service as a reserve apparatus until sometime in the 1950s, according to fire department records, it was never more than a curiosity.

Changed Firefighting

That wasn’t true of the Amoskeag steamer--a device that can only be said to have revolutionized firefighting in the late 19th Century. Los Angeles eventually bought four of the steamers, for about $5,000 each--a price equivalent in its day to the $150,000 the department pays for pumpers now. Pumpers were bought in 1871, 1875, 1887 and 1893 from the Manchester Locomotive Works of Manchester, N.H.

In those days, fire apparatus was often named for people prominent in city politics. The 1887 pumper, which is the only one that remains of the four, was called the J. Kuhrts, after city fire commissioner of the time Jacob Kuhrts, a man who dedicated much of his adult life to the fire service.

Pulled by three horses, the Amoskeag had a coal-fired boiler designed so that a small fire was maintained in it at all times. When an alarm sounded, firemen dropped tack gear from the firehouse ceiling onto the horses and stoked the pumper’s fire box. Because it had double the number of steam tubes of ordinary boilers, the Amoskeag could have a full head of steam up by the time it got to most fires. A steam engine drove the pump and the Amoskeag could produce more than 500 gallons a minute--fully a third the capacity of the standard pumper today.

The pumper was retired in 1921 and sat in storage for decades afterward, essentially ignored. At one time, according to Mort Schuman, a retired apparatus maintenance man who has been the unofficial head of the steamer restoration group for several years, the city owned 27 steam-driven, horse-drawn pumpers, a fleet of which the Amoskeags were the dominant pieces of equipment.

The steamer was still able to throw water as recently as sometime in the 1950s, but time took its toll and the boiler, last replaced in 1917, according to meticulous records maintained by the department, finally deteriorated and could not be used.

But that’s where DeFeo and his repair shop comes in. To enable a fully operational steamer to participate in the Los Angeles City Fire Department Centennial this year, the fire department is overhauling a pumper boiler for the first time since about 1920.

DeFeo’s objective is to have the steamer ready for a muster of antique apparatus scheduled for Aug. 23 and 24 at the Van Nuys Airport. Money has been a problem since just the boiler overhaul will probably cost $20,000--or four times what the pumper cost when it was new.

No city funds are available for the project but donations can be sent to: Fire Department Trust Fund Steamer Committee, Los Angeles City Fire Department, 200 N. Main St., Los Angeles 90012.

One problem DeFeo has faced is that boilers simply aren’t made now as they were in 1887 and much of the exact technology involved has been lost. There are no plans, drawings or specification sheets, either, so DeFeo and the volunteer repair crews have had to resort to photographing each piece as it has been removed and even videotaping some disassembly operations so things can be put back together correctly.

“It’s been really something going through this,” DeFeo said.”