Fire Bucket, "J.M. Prince 1830"
From the collection of National Museum of American History. Free to download, adapt and use — no permission needed.
This 1830 bucket, which belonged to J.M. Prince, is a good example of an ordinary bucket that would have belonged to an individual citizen. Having fire equipment supplied by private citizens was not without its disadvantages. The most common problem was buckets being used for purposes other than firefighting, for example, as mop buckets or as storage receptacles. There is one story of a fire bucket being used to store beans—and the beans then accidentally being emptied into an engine in the chaos of a fire. Some buckets were made with rounded or conical bottoms, so that they could not lay flat on the floor and be used as mop buckets. The development of professional fire departments in the second half of the nineteenth century eliminated such problems by centralizing authority over the hazard of fire.
National Museum of American History’s own description
