Anderson's story told through its fire department

ANDERSON, Ind. (AP) - When Terry King by chance saw an Anderson Fire Department colleague throwing away an old photo of a horse-drawn fire engine in the mid-1970s, he had no idea it would become the project of a lifetime.

Or that it would lead to the friendship of a lifetime.

And the publication of what Madison County Historian Stephen Jackson calls "the most comprehensive work of Anderson's history. Period."

A fire investigator for the Fire Department from 1976 to 1998, King began informally collecting photographs with the idea of creating a pamphlet.

"I had keys to the front office because I was the head of the arson unit, so I was going to go in at night and use the fire department's paper and copy all these old photographs I could find, staple them together ... and give them to the firefighters and say this is our history."

Then, another firefighter introduced him to Jim Jackson, (Stephen's brother), who had been fascinated with firefighting and fire departments since he was a small boy.

Jackson was never a firefighter himself. He worked as an engineer for General Motors.

"We became very close. My father had been gone quite a while and Jim became my quasi-father, I guess. He was a good Christian man. He gave solid advice, so we blended very well," King said.

"A lot of the ideas about the city, putting the history of the city along with the history of the fire department came through him," King added.

In 1893, Anderson shifted from a volunteer department to a paid department, a change that coincided with the city's burgeoning industrial development. The first paid department consisted of four men and a chief.

Along the way, they came across run books written by Caleb Shinkle, who was a captain in the department.

Those run books were similar to a ship's log, and Shinkle was a prolific writer, King said.

"In the run books he would tell lots of detail about the fires, so we gleaned a lot of information about them from him.

"That's what really pushed us into saying we have to tell the history of the city," King added, because the growth of the fire department reflected what was happening in the city politically and financially.

They decided the best way to tell the story was in chronological form, and ended up including the majority of churches, all of the schools, most of the factories, and they carried that theme into the late 1990s, ending their story with the Anderson High School fire in 1999.

The worst property damage fire in Anderson history occurred in January 1934 when the Union Building, 1106 Meridian St., caught fire, King said.

Firefighters struggled with biting cold and had to contend with frozen hoses and inadequate fire gear, at least by today's standards. Downtown drugstores opened to provide hot drinks and a respite from the cold.

According to King, an interior courtyard in the building became, in effect, a chimney that drew the blaze up floor-by-floor. The top floor, however, is where the city's telephone offices were located.

Two women, a Mrs. Henderson and Mrs. Gillmore, stayed at their posts despite the mounting flames, and were eventually rescued by a man named Burrell Wells, King said.

For a time, there was only one working telephone in the city, which was wired into the mayor's office.

Two fires, one in 1947, and another in 1984, rank as Anderson's two deadliest fires, according to King's research. Four members of the Chan family died in the 1947 fire.

And in the spring of 1984, Cliffton Gully Jr., 60, his wife Alwena, 50, and their three sons, Adrian, 18; and 12-year-old twins Alvin and Alwin were killed in a fire at their home. That's a fire King helped investigate, and he still has difficulty talking about it.

Jackson said his brother, Jim, didn't live to see an actual copy of the book in print. He died at age 85 in June 2015, several months before the book, "A History of Anderson, Indiana and Its Fire Department," was published.

"I don't think either of them (Terry or Jim) had any idea it would go as long as it did," Stephen Jackson said.

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Source: The (Anderson) Herald-Bulletin, http://bit.ly/2bla6dQ

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Information from: The Herald Bulletin, http://www.theheraldbulletin.com