Slaton Volunteer Fire Department

The town the firemen guarded grew around the Santa Fe shops, with a cotton gin and mill and the Caps and Singleton hotels among its early businesses. Slaton counted 145 businesses and 3,876 people in 1931, and 117 businesses and 3,587 people in 1949. In the late 1960s the Santa Fe began moving its offices to Lubbock, Amarillo and New Mexico, and the town lost residents and trade. By the late 1980s cotton and grain carried its economy, St. Joseph's held spring and fall sausage festivals, the airport staged air shows and a retired locomotive stood downtown.

What the plaque says

Slaton Volunteer Fire Department The Santa Fe Railroad established Slaton in 1911. In 1919, residents established a bucket brigade to help fight fires. Alex DeLong served as fire chief of the group, which used chemical tanks and buckets of water drawn from wells to extinguish fires. The following year, the city began work on a water system and fire mains, and in 1922 the city bought is first fire truck. The volunteer fire department grew over the years in manpower and equipment, operating first from City Hall and then from its own fire station beginning in 1928. Today, the firefighters serve Slaton as well as surrounding communities. (2005)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Slaton Harvey House — 0.5 mi
  A 1912 Santa Fe Harvey House in the railroad town of Slaton, restored as a museum, event hall and five-room inn overlooking a working BNSF yard.
• American Windmill Museum — 14 mi
  Lubbock's park of restored water-pumping windmills and early wind chargers, more than 70 of them turning outdoors and the rare ones under roof, with a megawatt-era turbine overhead.
• Buddy Holly Center — 15 mi
  The city's museum of Buddy Holly and West Texas music in a 1928 railway depot, with the house where the Crickets worked on That'll Be the Day moved next door.
• National Ranching Heritage Center — 18 mi
  A Texas Tech outdoor museum where ranch houses, barns, windmills and a depot from across the ranching country were moved one by one onto a single park beside the campus.

More markers nearby

• Slaton — steps away
• Slaton Bakery — steps away
• Mercy Hospital — 0.8 mi
• Ransom Canyon — 6.9 mi