The Fishkill School Fire of 1909
Allan R. Way, Company Historian
September 14th, 1909 was the date of one of Fishkill's most tragic fires. At least the adults thought so. The kids were happy, because this is the day that the school burned down. Herman Dean, who ran a local newspaper, wrote a history of Protection Engine on the occasion of its 100th anniversary in 1929. This account is taken from that book to which I have added new or additional information...
A fire that caused consternation and grief in this neighborhood was the destruction of our beautiful school house early in September, 1909. I suppose that the cause of it will ever remain a mystery. The school was located on the lot where its replacement stands today. School had reopened but a few days before with a new principal and one or two new subordinate teachers.
This is a postcard photograph of the Fishkill Union Free School as it was before the fire about 1905.
About dusk one evening, several people who passed within sight of the building reported a light like that of a lamp in what was the laboratory room (restroom) on the upper floor in the northwest corner of the building. (That would be the area diagonally opposite of the bell tower at the front right of the photograph). Later some observers saw a flash of fire through all the upper story windows. There was a real alarm. The Fire Company and a throng of other people rushed to the building and some immediately entered it and went to the upper floor. They found the window shades burned from all the windows and the main room hot as an oven, but no fire visible except through the half open door of the laboratory inside of which there were flames.
Just about that moment, Protection Engine Company made an error that defeated their later efforts. Instead of stopping the engine at the large fire cistern in Academy Street, and laying hose from there to the fire, they ran on and inserted the hose into a little cistern in the cellar of the school house itself. That was a cistern with a capacity of perhaps 1,200 gallons, if full. Access to this little cistern was through a six inch stove pipe built into the foundation wall. (Cisterns were wells dug in the ground at various locations around the village to catch rain water run-off and store it for fire emergencies. There was no hydrant system at this time).
All the fire seemed to be in the laboratory room, but it was eating its way through the ceiling, when the engine was placed, and the hose dragged up the stairs. The engine was the Button hand pumper we still have .When water was called for, it came in a stream that deadened the blaze handsomely. In fact it soon looked as if the fire was conquered. Then the water gave out.
To shift the engine seemed, for a time, to be an impossible task. The brass couplings joining the two sections of suction caught on the lip of the inner end of that metal spout through the foundation and it required about 12 precious minutes to get it by.
It took more minutes to get the engine to the other cistern and connect with the hose already laid. By that time, the feeble fire in the laboratory had revived, worked through the ceiling, the attic was an inferno, and the building was doomed despite the tons of water thrown at it by our engine and the Beacon pumper sent to our aid working from a cistern at Main Street.
Much of the furniture and fixtures in the building were saved. Quite a valuable library was destroyed and a box holding the school district records from colonial days was lost.
The Company log records the loss of the school at $15,000.
The postcard picture at right is the school building that replaced the burned one. It has had three or four additions since, but this is the original structure. A United States geodetic survey mark on the steps of this building marks the official elevation of the Village of Fishkill.