Amid the empty glass cases and the sprays of sawdust, there among the antique fire sirens and the boxes of battered turnout gear, something is fast taking shape in Hanover.
It's been kept alive downtown and in the outlying areas by career firefighters for more than a century, as they've hoarded their past and treasured possessions, as they've tucked away torn-off badges and boots worn from fire.
And soon it will be a reality.
Hanover Fire Department's museum will be open by the end of the year, said the borough's former fire commissioner, James Roth, standing this week among the piles of old paper and half-done drywall partitions.
With a little help from local residents, he said, and a few more weeks of work by volunteers now well used to their spare-time work, it will finally open.
"You name it, and we got it," he said, leading a tour of the site on North Franklin Street this week. "And we're going to put it on display."
The idea for a fire museum in Hanover, at least in its most basic sense, stretches back more than a century, Roth said, with local firefighters long saving everything from gear to equipment to firehouse furniture as a way to remember a storied history.
That's led to an old brick building near downtown full of donated items - rooms of treasures a handful of volunteers have been sorting through for months, years really.
Hanover's fire department has had career members on staff since 1891, Roth explained, and that's meant an above-average desire and ability to record and preserve the local fire companies' past.
"All that time," he said with a sweeping hand gesture, "it's like nothing's been thrown away."
And in the past few years it's all been piled in the small museum area at Wirt Park Station, and across the parking lot at the soon-to-be museum, part of the old Hanover Shoe complex.
Here is an old siren from the Pennville Fire Co. in Penn Township, in pieces now but bright red and easily reassembled in the coming weeks. Easily enough to scare a little boy or girl brave enough to make it sing again.
Here is an old horse-drawn buggy, built in 1894 and donated a few years ago by a Littlestown family. It's not exactly what a fire chief's wagon would have been back in those days, Roth said, but it will show how personnel traveled the bumpy borough streets before they rode in those big red trucks.
Here, too, is a round life net you might see in an old movie, its covering cushion stuffed away nearby. Ten men would stand in a circle and hold it, Roth explained, demonstrating the proper position, and then they'd urge someone stranded high on a building to jump. Don't worry, the firefighters would tell them, we'll catch you.
That's the sort of thing that can provide both a store of knowledge and endless hours of fun to locals who will soon be able to stop in, Roth said. They can listen to the old stories, browse the exhibits and even leave the kids in a special play area where they can have fun and learn about firefighters.
In the "Pennsylvania Room," there will be historic local furniture and other items originally given to the library that would no longer fit there, and a steady stream of new and different items rotated in from an archives room a few firefighters were still framing out with 2-by-4s this week.
"We'll be moving things in and out because we have so much stuff," Roth said. "Any museum is a work in progress like that."
Any museum, too, needs a bit of help from the private sector, a leg up from those in the community it seeks to chronicle. For the fire museum, that help has come in the form of item donations, the former commissioner said, as well as the borough's annual rental cost for the building.
But in the final push for a museum there in the shadow of the Wirt Park Station, a bit more is needed, Roth said. Likely between $15,000 and $20,000, he said, for the materials and fees to finish off the project.
It's a tough request in tough times, of course, the firefighters working at the building on Tuesday said. But as good causes go, it's hard not to think of donations to a history-preserving museum in Hanover as a good one. Now, they said, before those items are lost or sold off privately.
"But because the economy's so rough out there," said former fireman and museum curator Wayne Bollinger, "there's going to be a lot of history lost in the next 20 years if something isn't done now to help preserve it all."
That would be the real shame, the firefighters said this week, as they sorted and spackled, painted and paced the rows of display items.
"Look around and you see things from the early 1800s," Bollinger said. "You're talking about some of the oldest fire equipment in the country."
Around one corner is an old hand-pump engine, originally called the "Gazelle," eventually renamed the "Washington," Roth said, before it was bought from a Baltimore-based company and used out of the Chestnut Street station in Hanover.
The presumed reason for the name change?
Oh, they changed the name after that engine was in a parade, Roth said. For the pre-Civil War dedication of the Washington Monument.
That's the kind of local history that should be preserved, he said, along with the spirit that's helped get the museum this far, and promises to pull it through these final phases to an opening.
It's a spirit that can be traced back through those big red trucks and the steam-fired engines, Roth said, to the piston-pumped trucks and even the early ones in Hanover that were little more than a water reservoir and a crank to be turned by hand to pump the water.
Even before that, Roth said, to the late 1700s when it was early borough law that every man 14 and up own his own leather bucket. When that bell rang on Center Square, they were charged with hurrying to the center of town, each another link in the bucket brigade.
Each person responsible, in part, for the future of all the rest.
Send donations for Hanover's fire museum to Hanover Fire Department Museum, 241 N. Franklin St., Hanover, Pa., 17331. Checks should be made payable to "Hanover Fire Department." For more information call 637-6671.
Copyright 2011 MediaNews Group, Inc.
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