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1. Workshops of Democracy: The Invention of Volunteer Firefighting
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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c h a p t e r o n e Workshops of Democracy The Invention of Volunteer Firefighting Shortly before midnight on a tranquil May evening in 1849 the bells of docked steamboats and ringing of fire bells awoke St. Louis residents to the danger of fire. Hardly stirred by the commotion and grumbling about the late hour, residents slowly turned out to watch firefighters battle yet another steamboat fire along the city’s main artery, the Mississippi River. Indifference quickly gave way to interest and excitement, and then to dread. A burning steamboat, the White Cloud, had broken from its moorings and, propelled by the current, floated down the wharf. It crashed into other boats, setting them ablaze. As boat after boat flared, the riverfront became a raging furnace for nearly a mile. Then, suddenly, twenty-two kegs of gunpowder loaded on one vessel exploded in a pyrotechnic display. The repeated blasts transformed the city into “a scene of horrifying confusion.” Embers set structures along the riverfront ablaze. Northeasterly winds sent flames along the levee, toward the warehouses located adjacent to the river. Sparks alighted “on the merchandise lying on the wharf and the housetops.” Fearing the worst, bystanders joined firefighters working to check the blaze. The battle surged back and forth for hours. Unfortunately, by the time that night had turned to day the blaze had gained the upper hand. When the city’s water supply failed, firefighters could do little to stop the conflagration as it raced from square to square. Given the dire situation, a forty-one-year-old merchant and the leader of the Missouri Fire Company, Thomas Targee, took drastic measures to save the city. Targee ordered that gunpowder be brought forward as he prepared to destroy buildings in the path of the fire. As the chaos mounted, men carrying kegs of powder to the foot of the blaze along Market Street dodged flaming embers, which rained down and spread the fire. Racing against time, volunteers used axes to open buildings. Targee rushed into fiery structures, threw in the powder, and quickly darted away. He blew up five buildings before he died. As one witness recalled, “I watched Captain Targee, smoke begrimed and haggard, stagger and run past me with another keg of gunpowder on his shoulder. . . . Targee entered. Almost immediately there was a terri fic explosion.” Targee became the first firefighter in St. Louis to die in the line of duty, and his efforts failed to check the fire. The blaze expired only after the wind changed direction, and not before it claimed over 450 buildings.1 Such conflagrations were not extraordinary events in nineteenth-century America ; their relative frequency speaks volumes about one by-product of urban and industrial growth in the United States. Fire threatened the social order of the urbanizing nation literally and metaphorically, and, as a consequence, this problem greatly interested urban residents. Efforts to bring the fire hazard under control demanded sustained attention. They sometimes required extraordinary measures, like Thomas Targee’s last-ditch and fatal effort. Celebrated in the newspapers and later on canvas by local St. Louis artist Mat Hastings, Targee’s heroics represent the remarkable public service that volunteer firefighters provided to their neighbors . Although relatively few volunteers died in the line of duty in the years before the Civil War, and although their deaths were primarily related to saving property , firefighters protected society by endangering their bodies. The juxtaposition of virile manhood and horrible death, captured in Hastings’s painting of Targee, can be found in countless images and stories from the period, including the celebrated prints of Currier & Ives and the poetry of Walt Whitman. Whitman’s elegiac tribute to firemen in Song of Myself expressed well the particular danger of fire and the nobility of the service performed by the firemen attempting to master nature run amok. With great indifference and surprising swiftness, fire could threaten to engulf the built landscape, sap the vitality of the social order, and destroy the vibrancy of the men fighting against it. In the early years of the nineteenth century American urban dwellers constructed a system of fire protection in which the skilled bodies of volunteer firemen—as individuals and companies— assumed the risks that fire posed to industrial and urban growth.2 Volunteer firefighters celebrated their service quite publicly, creating mythic 14 Smoke [3.83.81.42] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:45 GMT) The...