At
ten o'clock on Wednesday night, December 5,
1871, a fire was discovered in the agricultural
implement store and warehouse of Messrs. Burbank
and Rollins on Antietam Street. The Independent
Junior Fire Company was quick to arrive on the
scene assisted by the Antietam Fire Company. In
a few minutes fire burst out of the roof of the
frame structure. The high wind continued to
blow, engulfing in its wake the adjacent
buildings.
The scarcity of
water in the vicinity, and the difficulty
experienced in getting at the fire until it had
burned through the roof, rendered the efforts to
save the building futile. The only water supply
for the fire engines was from the Oak Spring,
Ladle Spring, and several large public cisterns.
There was only one steam engine and several
small engines which were operated by hand.
In its wake, as the
flames spread from the agricultural implement
store and warehouse, they reached St. John's
Episcopal Church, which stood to the rear of the
Court House on South Jonathan Street, (now
Summit Avenue,) and then ignited the Court House
itself.
Because of a
shingle roof and the impossibility of reaching
it in time, the Episcopal Church, not long
before partially destroyed in the same manner,
was on this December night wholly destroyed.
From the roof of the church to the roof of the
new part of the Court House (the whole of which
was covered with shingles,) the sparks were
communicated to that building.
During the height
of the conflagration, and after the cupola of
the Court House was in flames, a number of
firemen and citizens, with the pipe of the
Junior Company, were in the great hall, second
story, fighting desperately to save the fifty
year old structure from devastation. Suddenly,
the cupola fifty feet from the floor - fell in
with aloud crash!
Fireman John
Fridinger, one of several men holding the ladder
upon which Henry Bester was opening the
half-moon window of the dome to enable William
Gould - an engineer - to bring the pipe to bear
the support of the roof, was crushed under the
fallen burning beams and pinned fast. John Smith
attempted in vain to rescue Fridinger! As a last
effort to save him, Smith "pitched" a bucket of
water over him. Then trying to draw him out,
found it impossible to do so.
The few remnants of
the charred remains of Fridinger were recovered
the next morning. Bester was injured by a fall
from the dome to the floor. His recollections,
in reconstructing the events of that tragic
night, was the words he uttered when the dome
fell "God save us!" Smith and Joshua Wise were
severely burned in their attempt to save the
building.
An editorial by
Edwin Bell of The Mail Newspaper, under date of
December 15, 1877, was titled "The Memory of
John Fridinger. It read, in part:
"Among the heroic
men whose memory and name will (as it ought to)
be forever cherished in our little community is
that of John Fridinger The following resolution
adopted by the Independent Fire Company, of
which he was a faithful member, and in
connection with which he gave his life, was
prepared by Z, S. Claggett "Resolved, That in
the heroin death of our brother-John Fridinger
incurred for the salvation of the property of
others, under the inspiration of the noblest
impulses which fill the human breast, the
descendants of John Fridinger may boast an
escutcheon more glorious than that of Emperors
and Kings..." The concluding words read: "For we
have all of us an human heart. It is the divine
revelation which is summed up in the words:
'Greater love hath no man than this...'.
In May, 1872
the walls of the old Court House were being
razed to erect the new building on the old site,
a rear wall fell upon three workmen - Wesley
Finnegan, Alexander Smith, and Frederick
Fridinger, crushing them to death. By a strange
chance of fate, one of the killed, Fridinger, a
youth of seventeen, was a son of John Fridinger,
who lost his life in the fire the previous
December.
Fireman John
Fridinger of the Independent Junior Fire Engine
Company No. 3 became the first Line of Duty
Death in Hagerstown and Washington County and
only the second in Maryland.
MSFA ROLL OF HONOR
The
young members of the Franklin Union Fire Company
formed the Junior Fire Company in 1842. The
young men also acquired the Franklin’s engine.
The juniors were incorporated on February 6,
1843. The company motto was “Here We Are.”
This
picture is of the junior’s steamer after
conversion. In 1915 Juniors took delivery of a
chemical engine on July 10th. Water
tanks later replaced the chemical tanks as the
years went by. Juniors utilized Seagrave fire
engines only between the years of 1915 and
1965. 
