Posted Father’s Day, Sunday, June 21, 2020.
“William Penn Hose Company steam engine and fire fighters in front of the company fire station on Frankford Road near Franklin Avenue, Philadelphia.” Photograph by Robert Newell, 1865. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.
Sometimes it's useful for a kid to have the President of the United States for his father.
The pair of steam-powered, horse-drawn fire engines in the picture up top were probably like their famed Washington counterpart Hibernia, a star of Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration celebrations, in function and design, but not as large or impressive. This company may have been one of three from Philadelphia who went to Washington in March of 1865 to help celebrate the inauguration and they may have brought at least one of those engines with them.
On Friday night, March 3rd, the evening before the inauguration, members of the Washington City Fire Department and the United States Steam Fire Brigade escorting those three companies of their brother firefighters from Philadelphia...
...enjoyed dinner at the Russell House, then formed in a procession and marched through the mist, the mud, and the crowds to the White House, American music blaring, their torches lighting up “fog of the avenue with a curious sort of silver haze,” a reporter for the Evening Star noticed. They expected Lincoln to come out and make a little speech…, but it turned out the president was not at the Executive Mansion, after all; he had gone up to the Capitol. No matter; the firemen marched over to the Union Engine House, at Nineteenth and H Streets, where the city’s prized fire engine, Hibernia, was stored and kept polished to a gleam. A technological marvel built by the great Reaney and Nafie works in Philadelphia, Hibernia had defended Fort Monroe, at the mouth of the James River in Virginia, when the Union worried that the fearsome Confederate ironclad Merrimack might set the place ablaze. After the Merrimack was scuttled, the engine was sent to protect Washington. Named in honor of the Irish immigrants prevalent in firefighting, the Hibernia inspired awe in neighborhood boys, including the president’s eleven-year-old son, Tad. That Monday, Lincoln had scrawled a message to William Dickson, head of the military-operated fire department, to “please pump the water out of a certain well, which Tad will show,” using Hibernia. The rambunctious boy, who suffered from a speech impediment and hated schooling, liked to insert himself into the middle of White House activities, and Lincoln was an indulgent father.
---from “Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln” by Edward Achorn.
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