The City of Philadelphia had not been laid out one year until it was visited by a fire, the sufferers being some recently arrived Germans and for whose relief a subscription was made.
From this time until 1696 no public precautions seem to have been taken against fire. In the latter year the Provincial Assembly passed a law for preventing accidents that might happen by fire in the towns of Philadelphia and New Castle, by which persons were forbidden to fire their chimneys to cleanse them, or suffer them to be so foul as to take fire, under a penalty of forty shillings, and each house owner was required to provide and keep ready a swab twelve or fourteen feet long, and a bucket or pail, under a penalty of ten shillings.
No person should presume to smoke tobacco in the streets, either by day or night, under a penalty of twelve pence. All such fines were to be used to buy leather buckets and other instruments or engines against fires for the public use.
An act was passed in 1700, applying to Philadelphia, Bristol, Germantown, Darby and Chester, which provided for two leather buckets, and forbade more than six pounds of powder to be kept in any house or shop, unless forty perches distant from any dwelling house, under the penalty of ten pounds. A year later the magistrates were directed to procure “six or eight good hooks for tearing down houses on fire.”
As the city grew, fires became more frequent, through faulty constructed chimneys and the general use of wood for fuel. Mayor Samuel Preston in 1711 recommended the purchase of buckets, hooks and an engine. In December, 1718, the City Council purchased of Abraham Bickley a fire engine he had imported from England for £50. This fire engine was then in Bethlehem. It was the first fire engine purchased by the city of Philadelphia.
The first “great fire” took place between 10 and 11 o’clock on the night of April 24, 1730. The fire started in a store along the wharf and burned several stores under one roof, two cooper shops and an immense quantity of staves on King Street, and two new tenement houses, all owned by Mr. Fishbourne; a new house of Mr. Plumstead’s; John Dickinson’s fine new house, and Captain Anthony’s house. Several other buildings were damaged and much property fell prey to thieves.
This disastrous fire made the whole population realize that new fire-fighting apparatus was needed. The City Council at once ordered three fire engines and 400 leather buckets to be purchased in England and provided twenty ladders and twenty-five hooks and axes.
A year elapsed, however, before two of the engines and 250 buckets were received, and Mayor Hassel directed one to be stationed in the yard of the Friends’ Meeting House, Second and Market Streets, and the other on the lot of Francis Jones, corner Second and Walnut Streets.
The old Bickley engine was stationed in the yard of the Baptist Church, on Second near Arch Street. As late as 1771 only six fire engines comprised the entire force of the city.