Wilbo Wonders About the 1898 Fireman's Memorial, St. Joe, Michigan

Every city has stories that can move the heart; for example, from my hotel window, I can see the Fireman's Memorial, erected in 1898, funded by St. Joseph's volunteer firemen and their kin throughout the United States. [NOTE BENE: This is less than two decades after the Great Chicago Fire and the tragic wildfire that scorched most of Michigan's Thumb and a fire that charred most of Wisconsin's door county. Not to mention the fire that consumed Holland Michigan in 1871, the night Chicago burned.

Firefighters fought with their hearts against a poorly understood beast that ran rampant at the 19th Century's end! On the night of Sunday, September 6, 1896, Yore's Opera House in downtown Benton Harbor caught fire, and St Joseph sent its fire department squad to assist its twin city north of the St. Joseph River. In a stroke of misfortune, the brick structure collapsed, trapping more than a dozen firefighters in a coffin of brick and timbers.

Five men from the St. Joseph force perished in the collapse with their fellow firefighters from Benton Harbor: Edward H. Gange, Silas F. Watson, Frank M. Seaver, Arthur Cahill and Robert L. Rope. Imagine a fire chief by name of H. G. Hughson --- not Wells --- who was moved to take up photography as a tool against urban fire.

After all, a grand tourist hotel that rivaled the Grand Hotel of Mackinaw, the Hotel St. Joseph, combusted not long after a photograph dated 7/4/1898 was taken. Hughson had recorded the laying of the cornerstone of Berrien County's stone courthouse on the Fourth of July, 1895, a Masonic ceremony that attracted hundreds of citizens on a rainy day. A stone courthouse with fireproof vaults meant no act of arson could make cloudy deeds to farmlands and homes.

Donald J. Stuck, an executive with the United Insurance Company of America, took more than a collector's interest in Hughson's images. Hughson's images could be studied by an insurance company making a rating decision or investigating an arson. Imagine, also, men with wagons laying the cables for the Twin City Phone Company in the summer of 1897. Now it was possible to call the fire department, rather than running to a fire alarm and pulling a lever.

Hughson probably knew that current technology for fire-fighting would not keep up with a new century's frenetic building pace, so he invited the daughter of George Snyder, Mabel Snyder, and a firefighter named Fred Alden in full gear and helmet, to pose in his studio in front of a drop cloth painted with a meadow, a floss and a quaint bridge crossing the floss. Mabel's long curly tresses spilt out of Alden's strong arms as the resolute firefighter bore her out an imaginary bedroom nightmare of flame and smoke. Fundraising in southwestern Michigan and the entire nation, Hughson and the city dedicated the Fireman's Memorial Statue in 1898, a marker meant to honor the lost, but also to teach a growing city of fire safety.