Hydrant Guard

Hydrant History: Founding Fathers & Firefighters The History of Philadelphia’s Union Fire Company Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Paul Revere, John Hancock, Alexander Hamilton, Samuel Adams: what do they have in common? Yes, protecting home and hearth from the Redcoats and, as it happens, the red flames. The invigorating mixture of new cities and revolutionary fervor […]

Hydrant History: America’s First Fire Teams A Look at Colonial America’s Earliest Organizations, and New England’s First Paid Firefighter   From bucket brigades to the first professional firefighter, early American settlers never stopped innovating to keep fire from consuming their growing cities. The first American settlement, Jamestown, was founded in 1607. Captain John Smith led […]

Hydrant History: The Great Fire of London of 1666 A Look at One of History’s Most Destructive Fires London in 1666 was a wooden city. Houses leaned up against each other like logs in a bonfire. Typical building materials were good tinder at best, or purely combustible at worst. Many of the city’s poor lived […]

Hydrant History: The Great Fire of Rome, 64 AD A Glimpse into Firefighting Tactics in the Roman Empire   One of the first conflagrations of recorded history gives an example of how dramatically an urban landscape can change after demolition by fire. Like the California of today, Rome had been suffering years of drought. The […]

Hydrant History: Introduction A Series on the History of Firefighting, Fire and Water Reform, and Hydrant Technology Hydrant Guard is grateful for the work of water agencies and fire departments. Our above-grade check valves work with municipal water systems to provide a solution to hydrant shears. Those same water systems have evolved over centuries to […]