MA Lexington Fire Dept 1921

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Lexington, a town about ten miles northwest of Boston, is best known as the site of the first skirmish of the American Revolution on April 19, 1775, and this 1921 view records its fire department a century and a half later. Panoramic group photographs like this were popular in the early twentieth century, when towns often commissioned them to document their firefighters and equipment. Small departments of that era were in transition, moving from horse-drawn apparatus toward motorized engines, so the arrangement of men and vehicles in a picture like this can reveal much about local firefighting at the time.

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