From Brush Fires To 12,000 Calls A Year

Over the course of the last 123 years, firefighting in Hamden has developed from a single, private volunteer company in Highwood to a professional department that anticipates 12,000 calls by the end of the 2019 calendar year.

Brush fires and Pearl Harbor are partly responsible.

Hamden Historian and retired fire Captain Dave Johnson Monday described that development of Hamden firefighting in an appearance on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline Hamden” program.

Johnson served as a firefighter in Hamden for 33 years, first as a volunteer in Mount Carmel starting in 1966 and later as a captain on the town’s professional force.

Hamden did not have firefighters until the end of the 19th century. The first fire company opened in the Highwood nieghborhood in 1896 — late, said Johnson, compared to other towns in the area. It was not a fire department, but rather a private fire company with volunteer fire fighters.

The next company was Humphrey Plains, in what’s now the Hamden Plains neighborhood. Others followed. It wasn’t until the 1910s that the town began to pitch in for the costs. It began to pay for an alarm system, and in 1918, started paying for a driver at the Highwood company. The company still elected the driver, but the town paid his salary.

Driving a fire truck back then, said Johnson, is not what it is today. ​“Back then driving a motor vehicle, especially a fire engine, and knowing how to put it into pump gear, that was a very specialized task,” he said.

In 1925, state legislation prompted the town to create a fire department, and the eight private fire companies in the town came under the umbrella of the town’s new department.

Then, Pearl Harbor in 1941 prompted the town to create a department that looks more like the department of today. The town had only volunteer officers, but it decided that it needed to begin paying them. Raymond Spencer became the first paid chief in 1942.

People in Hamden were worried that Hamden might be in danger if the war came to American shores, Johnson said. An Olin gun powder factory in Whitneyville would potentially be a target, as would many of the other munitions factories in the New Haven area.

When Johnson began volunteering in the 1960s brush fires were a big issue in Hamden, because open burning was legal until 1969. There might be 14 such fires a weekend.

Now, firefighting is a different beast. ​“The kinds of things that they have today we didn’t have 50 years ago. Rapid intervention teams going in on structure fires, things like that,” said Johnson.

Now, 75 percent of calls are medical. The department now has around 100 employees, and is projected to respond to 12,000 calls in 2019.

Click on the video to watch the full interview with Hamden Historian Dave Johnson, including discussion of political and other changes in the town over the years.