Here’s a list of North Carolina fire departments in 1896, as reported by the Statistician of the North Carolina State Firemen’s Association, for the year ending April 1, 1896. This reported was printed in the proceedings for the Eighth Annual Convention Tournament, held in Salisbury, NC, on August 19, 20, 21. 

The printed document–61 pages, plus advertisements–was scanned at Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina. The library has a number of proceedings, from 1896 through 1936, though with missing years. See catalog record. Most of the copies are bound in hardcover collections.

Read the report (PDF 2.0MB)

Listed is information about Asheville, Beaufort, Charlotte, Concord, Durham, Elizabeth City, Enfield, Fayetteville, Goldsboro, Greensboro, Kinston, La Grange, New Bern, Raleigh, Tarboro, Salisbury, Scotland Neck, Statesville, Warrenton, Wilmington, and Winston.

Here’s a historical treat.

Tabular data of the state’s black fire companies in 1905, in Concord, Durham, Edenton, Elizabeth City, Greenville, Henderson, Monroe, Oxford, Raleigh, Rocky Mount, Salisbury, Statesville, Tarboro, Warrenton, Washington, Wilson, and Winston-Salem.

Click to enlarge:

These pages are from digitized conference proceedings of the North Carolina State Volunteer Firemen’s Association. They were the state’s black firefighter association, organized in 1888 or 1889, and chartered in 1891. 

(Though one of the earliest recorded conventions of state firemen was in 1873, called for all colored firemen in state by members of fire companies in Raleigh, Fayetteville, New Bern, and Wilmington, was held in Raleigh at the Victor Fire Company hall.)

UNC-Charlotte has digitized a handful of these proceeding books, from 1905 to 1923. They’re noted as loaned by the Charlotte Fire Department. 

Each book is about 45 pages long, and contains conference notes, the names of the member fire companies, rules on the conference tournaments, and more.

Hugely useful, as this historian hasn’t found hardly any surviving documents about the NCSVFA. 

View those documents at http://digitalcollections.uncc.edu/cdm/search/collection/p16033coll1.

View the UNC-Charlotte’s digital collections landing page at https://library.uncc.edu/atkins/digitalcollections 

Here’s Mike’s master page of information about the NCSVFA (and its then-white counterpart, the NCSFA) at https://legeros.com/history/fa/

Here’s Mike’s hosted history of black firefighters in North Carolina, as originally researched by the late Chuck Milligan, https://legeros.com/history/ebf