Museum of Firefighting - Hudson, NY

[Guest]

I left out the part about the sheep's cheese...

May 19, 2006

Downtime

Columbia County, N.Y.:

Venerable Fire Trucks and Sheep's Milk Cheeses

By LISA W. FODERARO

THE NEW YORK TIMES

PARENTS often look for ways to introduce their children to the Country — that increasingly elusive land where big, round silos stand watch over flaxen meadows flecked with hay bales.

Columbia County, about 100 miles north of New York, offers the right tableau, but the affluence that has washed over the Hudson Valley from the growing numbers of weekenders seems to have made everything a little spiffier than the workaday version of rural life: barns are freshly painted; horses plump; stone walls elegantly laid out.

Although grown-ups can gaze for hours at such scenery, children can quickly tire of it.

But two very different destinations in the county are sure to awaken them from even the deepest Game Boy coma or Tamagotchi trance, adding up to a day of flashy fire engines and friendly sheep.

The Museum of Firefighting is a good first stop; it's in Hudson, which has become an antiques center recently and has several good restaurants for a lunch break later.

Endowed by the Firemen's Association of the State of New York, the museum houses 100 pieces of emergency apparatus, from a 1725 hand-drawn pump made in London to a 1974 Cadillac ambulance.

There are horse-drawn, steam-powered and motorized fire engines, along with all manner of equipment and ephemera, from ladders, axes and torches to uniforms, banners, lithographs and antique record books.

Visitors are allowed to climb onto several of the newer engines, an arrangement that delighted my own 4-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter.

One of the engines, a 1966 fire truck as compact as a small tractor, belonged to the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester and is credited with holding two large industrial fires at bay until city firefighters could arrive.

Then there is a quirky little race car, courtesy of the Sayville Fire Department on Long Island.

But the hands-down favorite on our visit was a 1955 fire truck from River Edge, N.J. One of the few that were white, not red, it is sleek and curvaceous, exuding the confidence of the postwar era. Best of all was the string inside the cab that attaches to a very loud, high-pitched bell outside.

The patient docents, some of them former firefighters who live in an adjacent retirement home, were serenely tolerant of a frenzy of ringing.

The halls housing the older engines are the heart of the museum.

Children can see (and in some cases touch) the march of technology, from hand pumps with long brass nozzles of the 1700's to horse-drawn, coal-burning steam engines of the 1800's and, finally, a 1928 gas-powered engine from Tarrytown, N.Y., that has a 1,000 gallon-per-minute pump mounted up front.

For girls who think that fire engines are for boys, there are the parade carriages.

Purely decorative, they were the vehicular equivalent of a Dalmatian. With sparkly mirrored mosaics, delicate filigree work and impossibly large spoked wheels, they make the carriage that transported Cinderella to the ball seem utilitarian.

My own daughter, bless her heart, whizzed past a parade carriage with an appreciative nod and headed straight toward a collection of vintage helmets that her brother was trying on.

Properly outfitted, they both beamed as they gently handled tar-covered canvas buckets that lined a wooden cart used by a bucket brigade in the mid-1800's in Jamaica, N.Y.

The museum's gift shop, with its life-size stuffed Dalmatians and pint-size firefighter uniforms, can be hard to resist. But there were ewes scheduled for milking clear across the county, and time was short......

[RocklandFires 44]

I left out the part about the sheep's cheese...

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Well worth the trip ! The collection up there is unreal. I go at least once or twice a year and always see something new. There are some real classic firehouses in the city of Hudson as well. 2 of their fire companies are the 1st & 2nd longest continuously active volunteer fire companies in all of New York. They just built a Super Firehouse to eliminate some of the old ones from the 1800's, which are now for sale for aprox $400,000 a piece.

Brian Duddy / Central Nyack F.D.