By Christy Avery
The Evening News and the Tribune
JEFFERSONVILLE, Ind. — Drivers making their way down Spring Street recently might have noticed a new addition to the Vintage Fire Museum and Safety Education Center : a two-door brick building resembling an old firehouse, attached to the museum’s signature yellow facade.
For Curt Peters, chair of the museum’s board of directors, the new view represents an opportunity for more eyes on the building with the completion of an expansion doubling its size and putting more red-hot fire trucks on display.
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The museum has paid off half of the cost due to the generosity of donors, and Peters said the board is starting a capital campaign to raise the additional $500,000 needed to complete the fundraising. On April 11 at 1 p.m., the museum will hold a grand opening ceremony featuring guest speakers and information about the expansion.
The museum opened in 2012, two years after a group called Friends of the New Albany Fire Museum purchased an extensive collection of historic fire memorabilia once belonging to Fred Conway, a volunteer Evansville fire chief and fire education pundit.
Housing more than a dozen trucks and hundreds of items ranging from old-school fire alarms and carriage lanterns to helmets and extinguishers, Peters said the museum has received so many donated relics over the last five years that the building ran out of space to store them all.
“A lot of them we had to store across the river in the storage facility in Oldham County,” he said, “and we knew that storage facility was not going to be available to us forever. A couple of years ago, we were given a couple unexpected and sizeable donations, and we decided to go ahead [and expand].”
The new building, connected to the original museum by a hallway, adds 7,000 square feet along with more pieces of Southern Indiana history.
“This building enables us to display these things that we otherwise wouldn’t have room for,” Peters said.
The 7,000-square-foot expansion adds several new pieces to the museum’s historic collection, including trucks from Louisville, Bedford and New Albany that help tell the stories of events like the 1937 Ohio River flood.
Most of the renovations are complete, but builders are still working on a second-story addition in the form of a platform at the top and “joker room” below it, which is where firefighters received input on incoming calls. A fire pole will connect the two areas, which will be finished later this year, and a vintage weather vane will be placed on the front of the building.
Walking around the space on Monday, Peters showed off a 1921 American LaFrance fire truck, famous for its use in New Albany during the 1937 Ohio River flood. The museum acquired the truck from Leavenworth after the town bought it from New Albany decades ago, and a board member restored it back bright and shiny.
In addition to incorporating new trucks and educational elements, the Vintage Fire Museum and Safety Education Center’s expansion includes an exterior renovation replicating the look of old firehouses.
Another piece, a 1935 Ahrens-Fox, served downtown Louisville for several decades and was involved in several major firefighting efforts. A 1930 REO Speedwagon fire truck in the collection was used in DeKalb, Illinois, and Peters also pointed out a 1953 Seagrave from Jeffersonville and a 1945 Buffalo Tank Truck from Bedford included in the collection.
There are two more trucks yet to come, he said. He emphasized that while the museum helps to tell local history through the fire equipment that served it, the museum also includes many pieces from all over the country, bringing in visitors from not only Indiana or the U.S., but overseas, too. Peters estimated the museum garners somewhere between 5-10,000 guests each year.
“We get tourists from a lot of foreign countries,” Peters said. “Australia, New Zealand , different countries in Europe , South Africa , Kenya . We have some things on Google that people pick up on worldwide, so there are people who come specifically to this area to see the museum and its equipment.”
That’s a legacy he hopes the expansion will continue to foster.
“It just expands the story,” he said. “Conway’s collection in the other room focused on early equipment that was hand-pumped, and chemical use, and steamers and so forth. This building kind of focuses on motorized.”
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