Steam and Speed: The Amoskeag Locomotive and Fire Engine Works

The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company was famous for cloth, but for a period of about thirty years in the middle of the nineteenth century, it also built two other things that would become essential to American life: steam locomotives and steam-powered fire engines. The locomotive division ran from eighteen forty-eight to eighteen fifty-nine. In those eleven years, the company built two hundred and thirty-four engines.

The looms and spindles of the textile floors were the company's heart, but the locomotive works occupied a separate set of buildings in the yard and employed machinists and foundry workers of a different kind. In eighteen fifty-nine, management decided the locomotive business had run its course and sold it off to what became the Manchester Locomotive Works. The fire engine business was different.

In the summer of eighteen fifty-nine, Amoskeag unveiled its first steam-powered fire engine, a machine it called Amoskeag Number One. Designed to fight fires that hand-pump engines could not contain, it could project two streams of water two hundred and three feet into the air simultaneously. Departments across the country bought Amoskeag engines.

When the Great Boston Fire broke out in November of eighteen seventy-two and burned through sixty-five acres of the city's commercial district, it was Amoskeag engines that helped finally check its spread. The fire engine works continued under the Manchester Locomotive Works name until nineteen thirty-two. The engines they made are still prized by collectors and fire museums.

They were, by contemporary accounts, both beautiful and terrifyingly effective.