Two-Wheel Fire Hose Reel

The reel arrived in a town rebuilding itself around 1910. After two disastrous fires Hereford organized a fire department in 1910, the same year a marble-faced courthouse replaced the wooden frame building hauled by wagon from La Plata in 1898. A new brick railroad depot had gone up in 1908, when the old depot's wooden water tank gave way to a new well and a metal tank, and electric power and telephone service were begun in these years. The Monday Afternoon Club also opened the town's first library in 1910.

What the plaque says

Two-Wheel Fire Hose Reel Hereford's mid-1913 equipment to fight fires. Hand-propelled, or (at a $5 bonus) hauled by the auto or horses of a bystander. Reel cost only $133, but in two months was discarded: a motor truck with ladders was bought. Prior to 1913 the fire wagon in almost every Texas town was drawn by a fine team of horses, trained to trot into place at sound of the fire whistle. The fire wagon charged down dirt streets with smoke billowing and horses at a dead gallop. After multi-million dollar fires, 1909-1912, Texas cities wanted better fire equipment. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Deaf Smith County Historical Museum — steps away
  Hereford's county museum in an early Catholic school: the Windmill City's pioneers, a half-dugout and caboose outside, and work by the Italian prisoners held south of town in the war.
• Buffalo Lake National Wildlife Refuge — 18 mi
  A 1938 Depression-era lake on Tierra Blanca Creek that has gone dry, now 7,664 acres of shortgrass, cottonwood canyon and a prairie dog town on the High Plains south of Umbarger.

More markers nearby

• Deaf Smith County — steps away
• Pioneer Windmill — 0.3 mi
• Mothers Park — 0.3 mi
• Town Without a Toothache — 0.4 mi