Akron Plagued by Fires
AKRON & SUMMIT COUNTY
Karl
H. Grismer,
Summit County Historical Society,
Akron, Ohio c. 1950 p 145-146
The first
public calamity which befell Akron was the destruction by fire of
the First Methodist Episcopal Church early on the morning of March
17, 1841. The building had cost 53,300 and was insured for $2,200.
The church was immediately rebuilt on the same foundation.
This was
the first large fire ever fought by Akron's volunteer fire
department, organized December 11, 1839, as the North Akron Fire
Company, with thirty-two members. Raising $600, the fire laddies
purchased a small rotary fire engine and also scraped together
enough funds to buy 50 feet of leather hose and rent a fire house.
Fire
drills were held regularly each week after the engine arrived
early in 1840 but the experience thereby gained helped the firemen
not a tittle in battling the fire in the Methodist Church. The
weather was bitterly cold and when the firemen began to use their
engine to pump water from the cistern at. the parsonage, it
immediately froze up. The fire fighters then formed a bucket
brigade but when water splashed upon them, they too froze up. All
they could do thereafter was to stand
close enough to the flames to let their clothes thaw out.
Despite this discouraging beginning, the town fathers did not lose
faith in their volunteer firemen and late in 1841 built for them a
small
frame fire house, located along the race on Mill Street, fronting on
Howard. During the next
six years, two more volunteer companies
were organized, the Niagara Number Two, with 47 members,
and the Tornado Number
Three, with 32 members.
Organization of the volunteer outfits did not save Akron from a
series of disastrous fires during the next decade.
Eight horses burned to death when a large livery stable next door
to the Ohio Exchange Hotel was destroyed by fire on September 15,
1844; Hiram Payne's large distillery near Lock 21 burned to the
ground
on
November 9, 1844; the Aetna Furnace at Furnace Street was
partially destroyed on
January 13, 1846; the buggy works of Collins
& Co., in
Middlebury, burned on March 11, 1846; Frank D. Parmalee's tannery
at Lock 16 went up in flames on November 4, 1846.
Almost
the entire business section of Akron was wiped out by an
appalling series of fires which started in the late 1840s
and continued throughout
the next decade. On June 9, 1848, the old Pavilion House,
Akron's first hotel, and
adjoining buildings on the northwest corner
of Howard and Market
were destroyed; loss $12,000. On September
16, 1848, four buildings on the west side of S. Howard
burned to the ground; loss $25,000. Seth
Iredell, Akron's pioneer merchant, lost
$8,000.
The famous Stone Block on the southeast corner of Howard and
Market built in 1836 by Hiram Payne, was gutted on December 27,
1848, along with adjoining buildings; loss, $50,000.
Thereafter, the downtown fires continued with dismaying frequency,
leaving in ruins a large part of the business section. One of
the worst conflagrations occurred April 30, 1855, when the famous
Ohio Exchange, on the southwest corner of Main and Market, went
up
in flames with a loss estimated at $24,900.