Excerpts from the DailyHerald.com:
The East Dundee FPD is celebrating its 125th anniversary. [According to] Jason Parthun, the fire district’s assistant fire chief, many have heard stories that people back then put out their fires with the help of their neighbors.
“There were no sirens, pagers or 9-1-1. People saw something burning and shouted for help,” Parthun said. “A bucket brigade of volunteers handed pails of water to each other to throw on the fire.”
After enough of those fires, East Dundee residents, whose village was only 19 years old, decided they needed organization and formed an all-volunteer fire department. They brought a horse or two and a fire wagon, and they were in business. Unfortunately, no records of early calls or later purchases remain; only 1920-era photographs of volunteers standing next to a fire truck stand as proof that the department existed before fire district was formed in 1959.
There was an advantage to turning the department into a fire district. A district gave East Dundee fire trustees the authority to charge property taxes to pay for equipment and services. Even though the village and the district were still in their infancies, fire trustees still had to pay for gasoline to power the trucks. They also had to build a fire station to house the trucks.
“The first firehouse was on Third Street,” said Mark Guth, one of the oldest East Dundee residents still active with the fire district. “It had two (truck) bays and room on the second floor to store the hay for the horses.”
In 1959, the house was torn down and replaced with a brick building that still stands, but no longer serves as a firehouse. The village’s police department has taken the structure over because it needed more room. Within the last year, the fire department opened a station along Route 25.
Guth is president of the district’s board of trustees. He has also worked as a firefighter and was the district’s first paramedic in 1975.
“I started with the fire district in 1959, and firefighters were paid $2 for each call,” he said. “At the end of the year, the firefighters received IOUs from the district because it didn’t have the money to pay us.”
In his first year of services, firefighters responded to 25 calls. Their services covered hundreds of residents. Today, the fire district covers 10,000 residents from the Fox River to South Barrington [and] has 30 full-and part-time firefighters and paramedics who responded to 1,350 calls last year.
Through its history, many East Dundee firefighters were related to each other and helped the department grow. Max Freeman was the district’s first fire chief. His brother, Earl, the only East Dundee firefighter to die in the line of duty, was a firefighter who died of a heart attack in 1958 after responding to a call.
Eugene Rakow served as fire chief until retiring in the 1980s. His son, Mark, took his place as chief.
Even Guth comes from a line of firefighters. His father, Marcus, served on the East Dundee Fire Department. His son, Mark Guth III, works for the West Dundee Fire Department.
A five-alarm blaze, the largest fire the department [battled was in] March 2007. Lightning struck and destroyed the abandoned Dundee Lumber Co. on Barrington Avenue.
thanks Dan
