An 1861 hand-pumped fire engine was taken up to Bath, Maine over the weekend by members of the Okos VFA to compete in the town’s annual fire muster.
The competition involves teams from across New England who hand pump firefighting equipment built in the 1800s. Whichever team can pump water from the engine the farthest is declared the winner.
The Gerry 5 VFA website, among other veteran-firefighter association websites, claims it is the oldest organized sport in the United States.
The Okos VFA engine finished in fifth place in Saturday’s contest, with a distance of 157′ 3.5″.
The league that it competes in, the New England State Veterans Firemen’s League, was started in 1895. Five years later, the Okos VFA, then known as the Phoenix VFA, joined it.
Its first championship in the league came in 1903, before it won again in 1922.
“We’ve been in a drought ever since,” Okos VFA member Rick Bartlett joked.
In the early ‘90s, Okos came within 3’9” of winning its third championship.
Bartlett was a firefighter in town for 35 years, and has been involved in musters ever since he was a kid, when his father was a member of the Gerry 5 VFA.
“My mother’s got a picture of me someplace, pregnant with me at a fireman’s muster,” he said. “I’ve been going since I was a little kid.”
The engine, or hand tub, used for the fire musters had a long history before it ended up in Marblehead. According to Bartlett, the engine was built in 1861 in Waterford, N.Y. It was then sent down to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and commandeered by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.
Lincoln sent the engine to Camp Curtin, the largest Federal camp during the conflict.
“There it served the officers quite well, bringing water to them,” Bartlett said.
From the camp, it returned to Waterford to be refurbished before finding its way to Marlborough at the turn of the decade in 1869. It remained there, where it served as a frontliner fire apparatus for the fire department, until 1895.
Last Wednesday, they took the engine down to Redd’s Pond to ensure that it could pump water ahead of the competition. Roughly a dozen gathered there to see the antique in action, including a number of parents with their kids, whose eyes and mouth were wide open in awe.
The name of the engine, Okommakamesit, is derived from the name of the Native American settlement that Marlborough was founded on.
In 1895, a VFA in Marblehead bought the engine after buying a similar hand-pumper that failed to work properly.
The engine is hand-pumped using a suction hose that is attached to the back, which goes into a nearby water supply. The engine has two “arms” that firefighters would hold onto each side of and rock back and forth.
As they would rock the arms, the pistons on the inside would move.
“It’s a big bilge pump,” Bartlett said. “So when one side comes up, it’s sucking water in, and when the other side goes down, it’s pushing water forward.”
There is also a vacuum dome, which helps water come through the engine. Also on the engine is a gold sphere-like air chamber, which helps to compress air in order to smooth out the water when it comes out of the pump on the other side.
Bartlett said that fire musters “are a dying sport” because more and more of the antique engines are being stowed away in museums or barns. He said that there used to be around 20 tubs competing in Bath, but this year’s competition saw only seven participants.
Despite that, Bartlett said that Okos, like other teams, still very much enjoys the friendly competition.
“A lot of nice people. It used to be that you were enemies, but now everyone helps everybody. The only time you’re enemies is when they’re on,” Bartlett joked.