Brockton's Station One, long called the nation's first electrically lit firehouse, retires after 142 years
A South Shore 360 Special: Brockton's Pleasant Street firehouse, where every lamp came on with a night alarm, moved its companies to the new Public Safety Building on Nov. 2 after 142 years of alarms, horses, engines and great fires.
BROCKTON, Mass. In the first years of the firehouse on Pleasant Street in Brockton, a fire alarm that came in at night switched on every electric lamp in the building, something the city has long said no firehouse in the country had done before, and, as the city's own centennial book put it in 1921, set the horses loose "with the striking of the alarm."
On Monday, Nov. 2, the Brockton Fire Department moved out of that firehouse, Station One, and into the new Public Safety Building at 135 Warren Ave., closing out 142 years on Pleasant Street in what the City of Brockton called "the end of an era for the city's most historic firehouse."
The city says Station One "housed four fire apparatus, along with the Deputy Chief's command car, The Rescue, Squad A, and Ladder 1," and that plans call for the old building to house a fire museum, with the possibility of apartments later. The department already points history lovers to the Brockton Fire Museum, which its history page says "was constructed for the purpose of preserving the proud history of fire fighting in the Brockton area."
When the light came to Pleasant Street
Brockton was barely a city when the light came. On Oct. 1, 1883, the Edison lighting station opened, with Thomas A. Edison himself in town for a week, according to "Brockton and Its Centennial," the book the city published in 1921. The plant stood at the corner of Montello and Lincoln streets, Bradford Kingman wrote in his "History of Brockton," published in 1895. It sent its current through the first three-wire underground distribution system in the country, the 1977 National Register of Historic Places nomination for the firehouse says. The Old Colony Planning Council, which now works out of the old plant, notes that burying the wires spared the city's famous elm trees.
The firehouse followed a year later, when ground was broken on Pleasant Street in 1884 for "a new fire house" in the center of the city, according to "A History of the Brockton Fire Department," written for the department's 150th anniversary and posted on the city's website. "In the event of an alarm at night, every electric lamp was automatically lit," that history says, and the station was "wired under the direction of Thomas A. Edison himself." The National Register nomination says Central Fire Station "has the first electrically illuminated fire station in the nation," a claim the department's history and the city's farewell both repeat. When the people of Campello saw it, the department's history says, they wanted one just like it, and they got their own new station in 1889.
The building itself was the work of Waldo V. Howard, whom the nomination calls one of Brockton's most successful architects of the late 1800s. He gave the city three stories of red brick on a granite foundation under a slate mansard roof, in what the nomination calls one of the finest examples of the Second Empire style in Brockton, with tall narrow windows, dormers along the roof and a raised granite plaque on the front marking the year it went up. When the nomination was written in 1977, the engine bays' wooden panel doors were painted green and white. The National Park Service entered the building on the National Register on July 25 that year.
The bell and the horses
From the roof rose the hose drying tower, and in the early years it wore a peaked cap with ornate brackets and held "a bell which was used as the fire alarm," the nomination says. The department's history records that the tower striker atop the Central Methodist Church was moved to the Central Fire Station on Pleasant Street. An old postcard in the James Tanis collection at the Internet Archive, titled "First Congregational Church and Central Fire Station, Brockton, Mass.," shows that red tower and its open belfry rising just behind the church next door.
The fires of 1884, the year the station went up, read like a walk through a busy working town, and Kingman's history lists them one by one: Tyler Cobb's billiard saloon at Main and High streets in January, a stable later that month, a slight fire in M. Linfield and Co.'s shoe-last factory in October, the Porter Brothers' shoe factory on Pond Street at the end of that month and a drug store in the Linden Block on North Main Street in November.
The postcard the city shared with its farewell shows the station as many grandparents' grandparents knew it, the brick and slate of Pleasant Street with a horse-drawn wagon at the doors and a crew in caps aboard. The motors came with the next century, when Brockton's first motorized fire apparatus was delivered on Sept. 23, 1909. On Nov. 10, 1909, the department put a "Flying Squadron" into service at Station No. 1 under the name Squad A, a crew that "wore red helmets and responded to all alarms of fire," according to the department's history. Squad A was still one of Station One's companies when the doors closed this month.
The darkest days
Two great disasters came with the new century, and the first of them struck Campello. At 7:50 a.m. on Monday, March 20, 1905, the boiler at the R. B. Grover & Co. shoe factory at Main and Calmar streets exploded, and the factory collapsed and burned. The wire report from Brockton, printed as far away as The Billings Gazette in Montana that week, put the factory "about a mile south of the city proper." It was the Campello fire station, which shared the block with the factory, whose firefighters charged into the burning building to reach trapped workers, Derek A. Canavan, then an assistant curator at the Brockton Historical Society, wrote in a 2005 history the city posts with the department's records. The granite monument the city raised for the victims reads, "There were 58 lives lost and 150 persons injured." When Brockton took up a relief fund for the families, the Brockton Fire Department gave $121.14, according to the fund's own 1907 history.
The deadliest night in the department's history came 36 years later, and Capt. Mark Picher of the department told it in a history the city posts: at 12:38 a.m. on Monday, March 10, 1941, an alarm came in from the box at Main and High streets for a fire in the basement of the Strand Theatre, and a general alarm brought every piece of Brockton apparatus to the scene. Less than an hour after the first alarm, the west section of the roof came down on the men working on the balcony, and 13 of the city's firefighters died. The city's farewell to Station One notes that the station sent its firefighters to the Strand that night. With the general alarm, the department's anniversary history says, aid was summoned from Abington, Bridgewater, Canton, Easton, Stoughton, Weymouth and Whitman.
The city's book of line-of-duty deaths names each of them, and among the 13 were six men from the two companies whose names were still on the signs over Station One's doors this year. From Ladder 1 came Bartholomew Herlihy, who died two days later of his injuries, and John McNeill, who was found in the collapse beside his best friend, Henry E. Sullivan of Engine Company 1. From Squad A came Roy McKeraghan, Denis P. Murphy, Daniel C. O'Brien and William J. Murphy, who was 29, the oldest of seven children, and lived on Kingman Avenue. Every year on March 10, Picher wrote, a commemorative service is held at Brockton City Hall, where a monument stands in their honor.
Ladder 1 had known that kind of loss before, because the department's first line-of-duty death came on July 4, 1912, when Michael F. Neafsey, a call man for 25 years, missed the running board as Ladder 1 answered an alarm and was run over by the rear wheels of the 7-ton truck on School Street, just beyond the railroad bridge, according to the city's records.
A new house on Warren Avenue
The station had handed off some of its jobs long before, and in 1980 the chief's office moved from Station One on Pleasant Street to the new training building at Station 6 on West Street, the department's history says. The new Public Safety Building, which the city scheduled to open with a ribbon cutting on Oct. 9, 2025, was built to bring the city's Information Technology, Fire and Police departments and the Brockton Emergency Management Agency under one roof, the city said. The department moved in by stages, and the city's IT Board minutes record that the fire department's relocation began the week of Jan. 8, 2026, and that by March 12, "BEMA, Fire Administration and Prevention has completed their move to the Public Safety Building." The companies at Station One followed on Nov. 2, and the fire department's own listing now gives Fire Station No. 1, Central, as 135 Warren Ave. When engineers walked the city's Traffic Commission through the Warren Avenue work for the new building in April 2025, the minutes say, emergency vehicle operations were expected "to remain similar to that of Station 1 on Pleasant Street."
The engines answer from Warren Avenue now, and the horses and the bell belong to old postcards, but Station One still stands on Pleasant Street waiting for the museum the city plans to put inside it, with the brick and slate Waldo V. Howard designed and the tower that once held the fire bell rising from the roof behind the doors that, for 142 years, opened whenever somebody in Brockton needed help.
Label: Reported by us.
Corrections
No corrections to this story. If something here is wrong, tell us. Every correction is dated on the story and listed in our public log.
Sources (15)
- "Fire Station One Retires After 142 Years of Service," City of Brockton, Nov. 3, 2026
- Central Fire Station, National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form, Massachusetts Historical Commission, 1977, National Park Service NPGallery, reference 77000193
- "A History of the Brockton Fire Department," Brockton Fire Department 150th anniversary book, on the city's BFD Historical Resources page
- "Line of Duty Deaths, City of Brockton Fire Department"
- Capt. Mark Picher, "Remembering the Strand Theatre," and Derek A. Canavan, "The Grover Disaster," Brockton Fire Department historical resources
- "Brockton and Its Centennial," City of Brockton, 1921, via Internet Archive
- Bradford Kingman, "History of Brockton, Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1656 to 1894," 1895, via Internet Archive
- "History of the Brockton Relief Fund in Aid of Sufferers from the R. B. Grover & Co. Factory Fire," 1907, via Internet Archive
- The Billings Gazette, March 24, 1905, page 3, wire dispatches from Brockton dated March 20, Library of Congress Chronicling America
- "First Congregational Church and Central Fire Station, Brockton, Mass.," postcard, James Tanis collection, via Internet Archive
- Thomas Edison Building history, Old Colony Planning Council
- "City of Brockton to Host Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony for New Public Safety Building," City of Brockton, Sept. 30, 2025, and event listing for Oct. 9, 2025
- Brockton Fire Department page and Station and Apparatus Photos page, City of Brockton
- Traffic Commission special meeting minutes, April 10, 2025, City of Brockton
- Information Technology Board meeting minutes, Jan. 8, 2026 (https://brockton.ma.us/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IT_Board_Minutes_010826.pdf) and March 12, 2026 (https://brockton.ma.us/public-documents/2026-03-12-it-board-meeting-meeting-minutes/), City of Brockton