Harmony Fire Company

By the 1940s · 4 South Main Street

Waypoint C · On the way · Old Town Hall Museum 6 min · Map · About 2 min read

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Mullica Hill's fire company crossed the creek once, and then it stopped moving. Harmony has answered from this lot ever since.

For its first decades the company worked from the frame firehouse at the bottom of the hill, on the far side of the creek. An insurance survey of the village in 1933 still found it there: about twenty-five volunteer firemen, roughly half of them employed in town, a motor pumper and a chemical truck behind the doors, and a siren to call the men in. Sometime after that, the company crossed the creek and built on this ground, where the village's little railroad station had stood since about 1879. By the 1940s the brick station in these photographs was here and working.

The photographs are the record. In one, the station wears bunting for a parade day, Harmony Fire Co. lettered over the bays, an ambulance backed into an open bay, and a sign by the door offering Red Cross emergency first aid. In the other, the company's pumper stands out front with the town's name lettered on its side. Nobody staged these for history. They are the pictures a neighborhood keeps of the company it counts on.

The building has kept changing while the ground has not. Township tax records date the station standing today to about 2000, so the brick front in the photographs has likely been rebuilt since, but the address never left the fire company. Harmony answers today as Station 23-1, from this same lot. Its first firehouse, the 1905 building at 14 North Main, is Waypoint E just over the creek; the optional North Main extension passes it.