Welcome home, Mary Frances City’s 1st Fire engine returns to where she started
BY HARRY MCCAWLEY harry@therepublic.com
Mary Frances
WHAT: Columbus’ first fire engine.
BUILT: 1917. COST: $19,000.
RETIRED: 1964.
RETURNED TO COLUMBUS: Tuesday.
PURCHASE PRICE FOR RETURN: $1.
ORIGIN OF NAME: Unknown.
MARY Frances is home again, back where her life began, in Fire Station 1. The Station 1 to which she returned Tuesday is seven blocks and 91 years from the Station 1 at which she started — but the firefighters who welcomed her this week gazed upon her as an old friend who had just been away for a few years.
Mary Frances is a unique part of Columbus history.
She’s the city’s first fire engine. The apparatus she replaced was powered by horses.
She came to Columbus in 1918, the year after she was manufactured by the American LeFrance Co. and was housed in the city’s station at Fifth and Franklin streets next to the original City Hall (more recently the Columbus Inn).
Some of the items on her frame were unfamiliar to most of the firefighters who have been studying her features from front to back since she arrived.
There was the crank just above the front bumper. Firemen didn’t simply put a key into the ignition to get her started. Someone had to bend over, give the crank a few sharp turns and hope that contact could be made to get her on her way.
There was a hand siren just above the dashboard but there was also a silver bell alongside. One suspects that the siren was a later addition and that Columbus’ early firefighters warned motorists of their speeding approach by clanging away at it with one hand while steering with the other.
But when one steps back and looks at the truck sitting in Station 1’s bay at 11th and Washington streets, there’s little — other than size — to distinguish it from the engines that followed in her steps.
There’s even a resemblance to its current next door neighbor, the 1939 Stutz fire engine that was and still is powered by a Cummins diesel.
Mary Frances — no one knows where the name came from — was not only the city’s first engine but it was the most durable.
It was built in 1917 and shipped to Columbus in 1918 for the eye-popping sum of $19,000.
Save for a brief respite in 1926 when it was out of action for months after a collision with a Columbus trolley car, the Mary Frances responded to local fires until 1964.
She went into retirement then and four years later she left the city, purchased by Dr. John Suelzer, an Indianapolis surgeon who also served as a medical adviser for the Indianapolis Fire Department, for $250.
Suelzer and his family eventually moved to Michigan and took Mary Frances with them.
The engine was restored and kept in good enough condition for it to be used in parades and special events.
The old truck was hardly a secret in the fire department. The late Bernard Dewey, the department’s acknowledged historian, joined the department in 1959 while the truck was still in service.
He not only collected stories about the truck but passed them on to fellow firefighters.
One of those recipients was Shawn McNealy, a current member of the department who developed a love of history years ago.
“You really appreciate what she meant to those early firefighters, when you think about what she changed,” he said. “The firefighters responded to fires behind horses and it’d take quite a while to get to some fires.
“I read one story where the chief and the mayor took the engine out for a test drive after it arrived. They drove out to Garden City and hit speeds as high as 51 miles per hour. Everybody was just shocked.”
They also were extremely happy to get rid of the horses. Within two years after the Mary Frances was put into operation, she had two other gas-driven engines for company.
She responded to thousands of fires, including some of the biggest in the city’s history.
Knowing of her history and her importance to the department, McNealy began searching for the engine around 2005.
Eventually he got in touch with Suelzer’s family and learned that he had died.
“I talked to his widow and she told me that the engine was still owned by the family and that it was even used for special events in the town like a Fourth of July parade,” he said. “I asked if I could come up to look at it but when we talked it was in the middle of winter and she told me that the snow got really deep in their part of the country so we agreed to hold off until the Fourth of July parade.”
McNealy and his family made the trip north for his birthday, on July 4, and he was given the opportunity to take a drive in the ancient truck.
“It was the thrill of a lifetime,” the amateur historian said simply.
As it turned out, the city benefited from the original contract in which the engine was sold to Suelzer.
Upon his death, Columbus was to be given first rights to the truck at a price of $1.
As far as McNealy and his fellow firefighters are concerned, that $1 buy back was priceless.
JOE HARPRING | THE REPUBLIC
At Station 1, George Kelly, retired Columbus firefighter, foreground, and Shawn Mc-Nealey discussed the return to Columbus of the pictured 1917 American LaFrance fire engine. Kelly remembers the engine still in service when he started with the department in 1958, while McNealey tracked it down and arranged its return.