The Old Firehouse

1905 · 14 North Main Street

Waypoint E · On the way · Old Town Hall Museum 8 min · Map · About 2 min read

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In 1827, a New Jersey man could get out of militia duty by joining a fire company. The state had arranged it that way on purpose.

Militia service was not optional. Under the federal Militia Act of 1792, every free able-bodied white male citizen between eighteen and forty-five was enrolled, and each man supplied his own musket, bayonet, and cartridge box at his own expense. Then, in 1826, the New Jersey legislature passed An act for the encouragement of Fire Companies. Members of a qualifying company were "exempted from militia duty in time of peace." A company needed one fire engine and between sixteen and thirty men. The exemption was the recruiting tool.

Mullica Hill's first fire company formed the following year, in 1827, and it seems to have owed its existence to the dodge as much as to the fires. What those men had was a hand pumper built in 1790, kept in a small building on the Friends Meeting property, and the company has it still. A hand pumper is exactly what the name says. It moved water for as long as men kept working it, and not a moment longer.

The modern company's founding survives in newsprint. "At last we have fire protection," the Monitor-Register's Mullica Hill correspondent reported in February 1904: an organizing meeting at the Town Hall, Capt. E. L. Stratton in the chair, eleven incorporators signed on, storekeeper Ed Bunning among them, and a name chosen, Harmony Fire Company No. 1. The correspondent closed with a line for the ages: once the fire district was drawn, the town would be "safe from all, but false alarms."

The next year the company built the firehouse in the photograph above, at 14 North Main Street. It still stands at the bottom of the hill. Harmony Fire Company is still in Mullica Hill, still answering calls.