Historic fire engine found rotting in woods

0 0 April 21, 2026 Edit this post

by Bill Buys

WHEN Stu Jacobs wandered through the woods of Bridgton, Maine, in 1987, he found no teddy bears having a picnic.

What he did find was an old fire engine, a very old one from a fire station where he once worked.

Stu just happened to be a former member of the Old Town Fire Department, so when he saw the faded OTFD lettering on the body and the Garford brand name on the truck’s front bumper, he immediately knew what he had stumbled upon.

He soon traced the owner, who happily donated the truck to the newly formed ‘1917 Garford Association’ and over the next several years it was painstakingly restored by enthusiasts.

All money for the restoration was raised through donations, benefit dances and other fundraising activities.

The truck is believed to be one of only three 1917 Garford fire engines in existence today -- one of them in Australia.

In 1917, the City of Old Town, Maine, bought its first motorised piece of firefighting apparatus.

It consisted of a Garford chassis and a body built by the Northern Fire Apparatus Co. of Minneapolis.

Much of the historical information about the truck has been lost over the decades, but stories have been passed down from fireman to fireman over the years about the competition between the then new petrol-powered truck and the traditional horse-drawn carts pulled by ‘Fred and Ted,’ who were housed in stables at the rear of the original Central Fire Station.

Reportedly, the Garford was often first out the door on an alarm, but was often passed by the horse-drawn units, especially in snowy weather where the solid rubber tyres of the new truck provided little traction.

In fact, it wasn’t until two years later that pneumatic tyres became available.

Although pneumatic tyres were available in the US from around 1900, solid rubber tyres was still used because they were thought to be more durable and capable of handling the heavy mass of fire apparatus.

Only from about 1920 did the US fire services switch to pneumatic tyres.

The Garford Company was started by Arthur Lovett Garford in 1892 as a bicycle seat manufacturing company in Elyria, Ohio and began building its own cars (and in 1907 in association with Studebaker).

Five years later Willys-Overland acquired the Garford passenger car business and from 1913 Garford continued solely as a commercial vehicle manufacturer.

Its first truck, produced in 1908, was a four-cylinder five-ton capacity unit featuring a chain drive, engine-under-the-seat configuration.

The company initially promoted its trucks by demonstrating the financial advantages of trucks compared with horses and emphasised the quality of its products with all parts manufactured in-house, rather than being assembled using components from other brands.

By 1914, Garford was publishing sales catalogues with 78 pages of illustrations of the full range of its trucks from two to six tons capacity.

The range extended from 3/4-ton to 10-ton capacity by 1916.

They were widely used during WWI and exported to several European countries.

Garford also built about 1000 Liberty trucks in this period for the US Army.

In all, Garford built some 6500 trucks for the US Government and its Allies.

Then there were the Garford–Putilov armoured cars produced in Russia in the WWI World War era.

Built on Garford chassis imported from the US, they were considered to be rugged and reliable, although with a mass of 11 tons and an engine producing only 30 hp (22kW), top speed was a very leisurely 11–12 mph (18–19km/h).

Armament consisted of a single 76.2 mm cannon in a turret with 270 degrees of traverse at the rear of the vehicle, and two or three 7.62 mm machine guns.

During its production from 1915 to 1916 the Putilov factory produced 48 of them.

In 1927, Garford was bought by Relay Motors but production declined rapidly and fell to just 100 units a year by 1929.

Relay went into receivership in 1932 and was bought by Consolidated Motors, which tried to make Garford profitable again -- but failed.

It was all over for Garford by 1933.

The Garfords that arrived in Australia during WWI were mostly used by NSW Fire Brigades, which had about 50 of them, and had British-designed Braidwood bodies.

They had four cylinder side-valve petrol engines and the chain-driven US-made vehicles ran on solid rubber tyres.

The Australian ones served many country towns and were finally retired when Bedford chassis gradually replaced Garfords.

The last Garford was withdrawn from Alstonville, NSW, in 1969.

Some interesting features of Old Town’s 1917 truck include wooden-spoked wheels, right-hand-drive steering, a revolution counter in the front hubs and manually lit torches above the hose bed that were used as supplemental lighting for night time calls.

Most US vehicle manufacturers had gone to left-hand drive by 1915, but Garford still used right-hand steering in 1917.

The original motor was destroyed during a large structure fire in Old Town in the 1950s in which the aging Garford was used for water supply.

It was reportedly nosed down a ramp into the Penobscot River and suction hoses were deployed in an effort to draft water into the pump to supply other fire engines that were closer to the actual fire.

Unfortunately, the oil sump was unable to lubricate the motor due to its prolonged angled position on the ramp.

The fire truck was taken out of service until a replacement 1956 GMC engine could be installed by the local Public Works Facility.

That engine is still in the truck, now on show in a small museum at the city’s original fire station.

Several 1920s-era Garford fire engines still exist in Australia, with notable restored examples serving in Nyngan, Trangie, Merimbula and Waikerie -- largely managed by Rural Fire Services brigades or local museums.