Fire Engines Fire EnginesThe Seagrave Company is the oldest fire engine manufacturer still making new fire engines today. This company was started in Detroit, Michigan, by Frederic Scott Seagrave, a 31-year-old salesman and inventor in Rochester, Michigan, who had some success making wood ladders and selling them to local apple orchards. His ladders used wire trusses, making them sturdier than most wood ladders of that day.
In 1880, a local volunteer fire department asked Frederic Seagrave to build a hand-drawn wagon and some of his well-known sturdy ladders for firefighting. His first few hand-drawn ladder wagons were on two wheels. The following year (1881), Seagrave & Company was established, making four-wheel fire department ladder trucks in a new factory at 418 Michigan Avenue, Detroit. These ladder trucks could carry more ladders than the two-wheel carts, and required two or three horses to haul them to fires.
The same year that F.S. Seagrave established his fire engine factory, in 1881, he also applied for his first patent on his trussed ladder system. Patent #278,051 was granted to him on May 22, 1883. Over the next 20 years, Frederic S. Seagrave would greatly improve his truss system for wood ladders (for example, eliminating the truss wires), vastly increasing their strength and rigidity, and reducing their overall weight, compared to conventional wood ladders. Seagrave also invented and patented numerous other fire apparatus improvements during those first 20 years.
Within its first ten years, Seagrave & Company had expanded from making ladder trucks, to also making hand-drawn and horse-drawn hose carriages and chemical engines, with two or four wheels. By 1891, demand for Seagrave's diverse line of fire apparatus had outgrown the capacity of the Detroit plant, and Frederic Seagrave began to move operations to a new two-story brick factory on West Lane Avenue in Columbus, Ohio. The move from Detroit to Columbus took two years to complete.
In 1898, the success of Seagrave fire engines attracted the notice of Julius Stone, a Columbus banker who owned the Ohio Buggy Company. Seagrave and Stone formed a partnership, and renamed the company from Seagrave & Co. to The Seagrave Company.
In 1902, Julius Stone bought out Frederic Seagrave's share of the partnership, and the company moved again, this time into Stone's former Ohio Buggy Company at 2000 South High Street, also in Columbus, Ohio. This factory, conveniently located on the main railroad freight line through downtown Columbus, let Seagrave ship its fire engines all over the U.S., and indeed all over the world. 2000 South High Street would be Seagrave's home for the next 63 years, doubling its number of buildings from two to four in 1910, and adding yet two more buildings in 1928. This complex is still home to one of Seagrave's corporate successors.
In 1901, Frederic Seagrave, and his son Warren Edmund Seagrave, established the W.E. Seagrave company at Walkerville, Ontario, to build and sell Seagrave fire engines in Canada. When F.S. Seagrave sold out his Columbus operations to Julius Stone a year later, he retained the right to build and sell Seagrave fire engines at the Walkerville plant. Always the inventor, Frederic Seagrave developed new types of aerial ladders and water towers from this Canadian plant, and some of these Canadian innovations would later become the basis for fire engines built at the main Columbus plant.
In 1902, the same year that Frederic Seagrave sold out his interest in the Columbus fire engine operations to Julius Stone, another event was occurring in Columbus that would eventually have a profound impact on the Seagrave company. For in 1902, two local inventors, Lee A. Frayer and William Miller, began building autombiles in Columbus. In 1905, Frayer-Miller built the first six-cylinder automobile in the U.S., rated at 36 horsepower. In 1906, a 4-cylinder Frayer-Miller was one of the few cars to complete the Vanderbilt Cup cross-country auto race. An unusual feature of the Frayer-Miller was that it was air-cooled, so there was no water in the radiator, to freeze up and crack the engine block during those cold Ohio winters.
In 1907, Oscar Lear, a Columbus-based promoter of new inventions, was impressed enough with Frayer-Miller's cars to join the company and start marketing these cars aggressively. He approached the management of Seagrave about building a fire engine on a Frayer-Miller automobile chassis. Why Seagrave? First, Seagrave was in the same city (Columbus) as Frayer-Miller. Second, Seagrave was one of the biggest and best-known fire apparatus manufacturers in the United States. But there is also evidence that Seagrave already had some connection with Frayer-Miller two years earlier, when Seagrave offered four-cylinder, air-cooled autombiles as fire chief's cars in the September 5, 1905, issue of Fire Engineering magazine. So it was a natutral choice to have Seagrave market hose wagons and chemical cars on Frayer-Miller chassis.
And thus the Seagrave Company became one of the first manufacturers of horse-drawn fire engines to offer gasoline-powered fire engines. On June 27, 1907, the very first Seagrave/Frayer-Miller fire engine, a hose wagon with four-cylinder, 24-horsepower motor, was driven 50 miles from the Columbus factory to Chillicothe, Ohio, and returned by a longer route, 55 miles back to Columbus, with fire chiefs from all over southern Ohio and northern Kentucky on board. The entire 105-mile trip took 8 hours and 17 minutes, averaging 13 miles per hour.
The Frayer-Miller automobile was not beefy enough for practical use as a fire engine. So Frayer-Miller engineers created a stronger chassis frame, a larger clutch, and increased the air flow for cooling. Besides its use in Seagrave fire engines, this redesigned Frayer-Miller became the basis for a new line of Frayer-Miller commercial trucks, complementing the company's traditional automobile line. By year's end 1907, Seagrave was cranking out motorized hose wagons and chemical cars for customers all over the U.S. and Canada.
In 1908, Seagrave developed a massive tractor for hauling aerial ladder trucks and water towers. This tractor bore no resemblance to any commercial truck that Frayer-Miller had ever built, but it did use the F-M air-cooled 6-cylinder engine.
Frayer-Miller went bankrupt in 1909. Seagrave then acquired the manufacturing rights to the Frayer-Miller air-cooled engines. They also acquired the remaining inventory of unsold Frayer-Miller cars, and repackaged them as fire chief's cars and police squad wagons. The rights to Frayer-Miller's commercial truck designs were sold to the Kelly-Springfield Company of Springfield, Ohio, a well-known tire manufacturer. Frayer-Miller trucks, renamed Kelly-Springfield, continued in production until 1928.
By 1910, W.E. Seagrave in Canada was also building the Frayer-Miller based motorized hose wagons, chemical cars, and tractors. In 1917, W.E. Seagrave also expanded into building commercial trucks, powered by water-cooled Waukesha and Hirschell-Spillamn engines. These trucks could haul loads up to 3-1/2 tons. That same year, Seagrave of Canada built the first commercial truck in North America to be powered by a V-8 engine.
By 1911, Seagrave realized that air-cooled engines were not practical, and introduced their own water-cooled four-cylinder and six-cylinder T-head engines. The air-cooled engine continued to be available for a few more years, before it was phased out in favor of water cooling. Seagrave model designations made the distinction by using AC for Air Cooled and WC for Water Cooled as part of the model number.
Most fire apparatus manufacturers in the first three decades of the 20th century used positive-displacement fire pumps, either of the piston or rotary type. These pumps were extremely quick to pick up water, and could apply tremendous pressure to move water through long hose lines. But they had the drawback of having a lot of moving parts, which could and did easily break down. Also, there was a practical upward limit to the size and capacity of positive-displacement pumps, before the sheer weight of all those moving parts required more engine power than was practical in a truck.
In 1911, Seagrave teamed with the Gorham Fire Apparatus Company of Oakland, CA, to build America's first fire engine with a centrifugal pump, and it was successfully tested in Oakland on July 27, 1912. Seagrave would promote the advantages of centrifugal pumps (fewer moving parts, lighter weight, less maintenance, and virtually no upwward limit to pump capacity) for about 20 years, before the rest of the industry caught up to them.
The main reason that the fire service resisted centrifugal pumps for so long, is the fact that they are considerably slower than the positive-displacement types, requiring priming by a smaller rotary pump before they can draw water into the pump. Typically, a piston or rotary pump can suck-up and discharge water in 4.5 to 8 seconds, with 6 seconds about the norm, versus 30 to 60 seconds typical of a centrifugal pump. Centrifugal pumps also have less power, to overcome loss of water and pressure from friction loss in the fire hose, than piston and rotary pumps do. But eventually, the economy and efficiency of centrifugal pumps outweighed these objections. After diesel truck engines became common-place in the 1960s, some diesel-powered centrifugal pumpers could actually EXCEED the power delivered by traditional gasoline-powered positive-displacement pumps.
Today, every new fire engine made in America, regardless of manufacturer, uses a centrifugal pump. Today's centrifugal pump capacities are routinely 1500, 2000, or even 2500 gallons per minute, versus the 1300 GPM limit for the biggest practical piston type, and 1500 GPM for the biggest practical rotary type, fire pumps. In 1965, Mack Trucks built the Super Pumper, with an 8,800-gallon per minute DeLaval centrifugal pump. Today, a stationary centrifugal fire pump in use in Holland has a capacity in excess of 10,000 U.S. gallons per minute. So once again, Seagrave led the way with a new technology (the centrifugal pumper) that would become the standard of the fire apparatus industry.
Julius Stone and a handful of local investors continued to own and operate The Seagrave Company until 1925, when capital was needed for expansion of the factory. A group of investment bankers then bought into the company, and the company name changed to The Seagrave Corporation. Although Julius Stone would continue to be active in this new company, the company's operations would for many years be in the charge of Howard Spain, General Manager.
As with most vehicle manufacturers, the Stock Market Crash of October 29, 1929, and the Great Depression that resulted, had a severe impact on The Seagrave Corporation, dropping annual sales of new fire engines from 300 in 1929 to 145 in 1935.
Always a pioneer, Seagrave intoduced one of the first all-steel, hydraulically-raised aerial ladders in 1935, and began manufacturing fire engines with all-steel safety cabs as early as 1937. Positive safety ladder locks, introduced in 1938, ensured that Segrave ladders stayed in place when used or stored. All of these innovations are a standard part of today's fire engines of all makes.
Seagrave did lag behind some of the industry in a few innovations, however. Although American-LaFrance offered cab-forward apparatus in 1947, and Crown followed in 1951, Ahrens-Fox in 1956,and Mack in 1958, the first cab-foward Seagrave was not until 1959. And although the first diesel-powered fire engine in America (a Stutz) appeared in 1939, Seagarve did not standardize on diesel engines until 1969, preferring to stick with improved versions of the Seagrave V-12 gasoline powerplant introduced in 1932.
The 1950s were a time of great expansion for Seagrave. In 1952, they acquired Fyr-Fyter, a supplier of fire extinguishers and other firefighting equipment used on Seagrave fire engines. Three years later, Seagrave acquired a competitor, Maxim Motors, a long-time manufacturer of fire engines at Middleboro, MA.
In 1957, for the first time, Seagrave diversified beyond the manufacture of fire engines, including divisions that made modular homes, paints, building materials, and there was even a leather processing division.
In 1963, the fire engine division of the Seagrave Corporation was acquired by the Four Wheel Drive (FWD) Corporation, manufacturers of multi-drive, heavy-duty commercial trucks and fire apparatus. FWD had begun in 1907, when brothers-in-law Otto Zachow and William Besserdich, both blacksmiths in Clintonville, WI, developed a four-wheel drive mechanism and fitted it to a Reo touring car.
In mid-1963, Seagrave moved its offices and factory into the FWD plant in Clintonville, Wisconsin, where the renamed Seagrave Fire Apparatus, Inc. makes new fire engines to this day.
The nine other divisions of Seagrave, put together in 1957, were renamed Vista Industries when FWD acquired the fire engine division in mid-1963. Vista continues operations in Seagrave's old Columbus factory. The century-old Seagrave factory on High Street in Columbus is two stories high, and a block long. Although no fire engines have been built there in 35 years, a huge but faded sign still says Seagrave on the wall of the factory, and even the water tank still says Seagrave on it (some of the lettering still shows through the rust on the tank's exterior).
The remaining chapters of this book show and describe the various types of Seagrave fire engines built over the years, as well as the factories where they were built, and the people who built and sold them.
This page was last updated on January 13, 1999.