Salem eyes firefighting museum
Sunday, July 13, 2008
By Randall Clark rclark@sjnewsco.com
SALEM Just across the street from the hulking steel beams and heavy machinery of this Salem County town’s multi-million construction project, local volunteers toil away at their own labor of love.
The Salem Fire Museum on East Broadway, once a bustling station of the Union Fire Co. in the days when horses pulled tankers, was on its way to becoming yet another relic of the city’s former glory.
But a group of dedicated firefighters and local union workers are putting in countless volunteer hours to keep alive the memories of an entire department.
The remodeling and renovating reach from the front to the back and top to bottom of the two-story building, according to Robert Klein, a Salem City firefighter and retired electrical technician who put in 36 years at nearby Mannington Mills.
Donated materials and artifacts for the museum are already piling up on the second floor, despite a great deal of work still left to be done there.
“The place was falling apart,” Klein said, looking at the peeling paint along one wall. “Everything was going to pieces, the roof was leaking real bad. The walls were in poor shape. It was a mess.”
Klein, who is spearheading the effort, said the building was an active firehouse until approximately 12 years ago. Involved with the project for about three years, he said that work at the site started with gutting the building down to the bare walls.
“Within the last two and a half years is when we started putting things back in and started to make it look like something,” Klein said.
Supplies have been donated from various organizations and companies, or generated from different fundraising activities over the last five or six years, Klein said. He says he doesn’t know how he could even estimate how much the project has cost in materials and labor.
Hundreds of hours have been put in by members of Carpenters Local 542, who offered their talents at no cost.
“We’ve been doing some work the past year and we have more to come,” said Sam Carmon, president of Local 542. “We’ve been involved in the community for years, out in the public giving back to our friends and neighbors.”
For these volunteers, it is work done after hours, according to union pipefitter Dan Mailley.
“It became a whole bigger undertaking when these guys came, a lot you can’t see now that the drywall’s covering it,” Mailley said. “These young guys giving up their Friday nights they have wives and girlfriends at home, but they are here. It tells a lot about these guys.”
The building has been completely rewired electrically, with new duct work and heating/cooling systems. The floors are being rebuilt, drywalls installed and the ceilings are getting spackled and painted.
George Ahl is going to build a fireplace where one window in the back has rotted out, Klein said, and the plumbing has been addressed. Although it is unclear when the project will be completed, it is going to be a proud symbol of the city, according to workers.
Klein scans over a fire broom that was once used to beat brush fires out, and explains the trappings of an old ventilation system that appears to be from the World War I era with some of the original dust. The gear will eventually fill the museum.
“I gotta keep moving this stuff out of everybody’s way, and it keeps coming in,” Klein said. “This stuff is no longer even in the fire service … but it’s definitely part of our history. This is where it belongs.”