In the days before modern fire engines, Marbleheaders fought fires with buckets like this one. The bucket is emblazoned with the Roman god Mercury, the messenger of the Gods, who trumpets the call for help as his winged feet glide across the sky. When ‘Headers discovered a fire, they rang church bells to sound the alarm and citizens answered the call by grabbing their fire buckets and running to the source of the blaze.
To fight the fire, friends and neighbors lined up in a bucket brigade, which consisted of two lines. One line of people filled the buckets at a water source, usually a trough. The bucket brigade passed these full buckets down the line, where they threw the water onto the flames. Then a second line passed the empty buckets back to the water source.
Their goal was to prevent the fire from spreading to neighboring buildings and causing a town-wide blaze, rather than saving the building where the fire started. When the smoke cleared, ashen Marbleheaders retrieved buckets with their name written on them. The bucket pictured here belonged to Samuel G. Rea, a shoemaker active in the 1840s.
By the late 1800s, organized fire companies and steam-powered fire engines made the bucket brigade obsolete.
Jarrett Zeman is the assistant director of the Marblehead Museum. “From the Vault” is a partnership between the Marblehead Museum and the Current.
