Historic Hallowell

The Cascade Hand Tub, built by Samuel Merrick of Merrick & Co. in Philadelphia in 1819, may well be the oldest fire engine in the United States and certainly is the oldest in New England.

Handtubs operated by making a long pole with a piston on each end go up on one side and down on the other. Dy doing this at sixty strokes per minute, they pumped water through a leather hose. The Cascade Hand Tub was nothing like the fire engines used today. Its tank was five and a half feet long with a pump in the center. It had two-foot high wooden wheels with a half-inch strip of iron around them and a fifty foot leather hose. It had no way of taking water from a source (for example, a fire hydrant) because suction had not been discovered yet. The water had to be brought using buckets and then pumped by two men to create a half inch wide stream that could reach up to 60 feet! This took lots of effort but was much more effective than trying to put a fire out using only buckets of water.

It was a real innovation and helped fight fires considerably, even though fires were few and far between because houses were made of heavy cut wood from the forest regions around Hallowell and the logs that floated down the Kennebec. These logs at most burned slowly. There were also no matches at the time. But even so, the Cascade hand tub was a valuable asset to the Hallowell fire department.