This hand tub was purchased from the City of Rockland in 1885 for $200, and the “engine” remained in service until 1919. The firefighting apparatus is now on display at Brunswick Fire Department headquarters on Pleasant Street. Lori-Suzanne Dell photo

Brunswick has had many notable fires since its settlement in 1628, but this month marks the 199th anniversary of the Great Brunswick Fire of 1825.

In that year, with a population of nearly 3,000, Brunswick was a flourishing little village brisk with sawmills, cotton manufacturers, lumber mills, grist mills, tenement houses, shops and businesses.

At approximately 11 a.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 13, 1825, a fire began under “the heating furnace” at the cotton manufactory on the banks of the Androscoggin River, just “above where the swinging bridge exists today.” The temperature was -13 degrees Fahrenheit.

Brunswick did not have an officially organized fire service, other than a handful of private citizens who devoted themselves to operating the town’s only fire pump, a 15-year-old “hand tub” known as “the Mechanic.” And fire suppression relied heavily on volunteers from the Washington Fire Club.

The Mechanic was a centrifugal force pump built over the deck of a wooden wagon that, in time of fire, was manned by a team of men who manipulated the see-saw action of the pump using brute force. Water was fed into the Mechanic by a human bucket brigade.

At the factory, the blaze likely spread quickly along the flax oil–soaked wooden floors before consuming stored cotton bales, which then engulfed the timbers of the mill’s structure. Arctic breezes flowing in off the Androscoggin River likely fanned the inferno. Meanwhile, volunteers with another apparatus raced from Topsham and Bath to join in the fight.

Soon, the fire jumped from structure to structure along the crowded banks of the river’s edge. The fire moved rapidly eastward, westward and southward, spreading to tenements buildings housing mill workers and their families. Citizens struggled against frostbite while hauling buckets of water up the banks of the river to the waiting reservoir of the Mechanic.

Men rapidly pushed and pulled on the handles of the Mechanic, forcing the icy water supply through the frosty hoses and nozzles that were trained onto the rapidly spreading flames, which had burned as far as Maine Street, along Mill, Bow and Union streets.

When the conflagration was over, both the Brunswick Cotton Manufactory and the Maine Cotton and Woolen Factory were laid waste in a heap of smoldering ruins. “Two stores, a grist mill, and two sawmills” were also gone. Five tenement houses were destroyed, and “a number of mechanic shops” had vanished, while many other buildings suffered repairable damages.

In all, 33 buildings were leveled. Eleven families consisting of 68 people were now homeless, and at least 50 people were now out of work, leaving the Christmas wishes of many of Brunswick’s youth also in ruins.

The Great Brunswick Fire of 1825 was a hard-learned lesson which led to the purchase of a state-of-the-art hand pumper affectionately called “the Hydraulian.” Twenty-five men were committed to the crew of the Hydraulian and the Washington Fire Club morphed into Brunswick’s first organized volunteer fire company.

Volunteers were required “to keep, in readiness for use, a canvass bag, a bed key and two leather fire buckets.” The canvass bags helped firemen to save family heirlooms, the two leather buckets were used to bring water to the pumper and to extinguish flames, while the bed keys were carried to disassemble the family bed so that it too could be saved from fire.

By 1826, the Brunswick Watch Association was formed to patrol the town and specifically look for fires and to exert some measure of fire prevention. Fifty men now swelled the ranks of Brunswick’s firefighting volunteers, and a formal move was planned to purchase a new engine and build a new engine house.

Ten years later, in November 1836, the village of Brunswick was charged with “the construction of reservoirs and aqueducts for the procuring of water” to assist fire companies in fighting conflagrations, and the order also called for the “organizing and maintaining of an efficient fire department,” while the town further sought “to devise ways and means for protecting the village against fire.”

By 1885, the Town of Brunswick owned four hand tubs. The “Niagara No. 3,” the third hand tub pumper to bear that name, was purchased and remained in service until 1919. Today, the “Niagara No. 3” is on display at the Brunswick Fire Department’s new central fire station on Pleasant Street.

Today, the Great Brunswick Fire of 1825 is remembered as a historic event that transformed our town and still offers hard-learned lessons from one of the more locally disastrous of our Stories from Maine.

Lori-Suzanne Dell is a Brunswick author and historian. She has published four books and runs the “Stories from Maine” Facebook page.