BickleSeagraveAerialLadderTruck01

Bickle Seagrave Aerial Ladder Truck (circa 1945)

Barnston Island - The island was named for George Barnston, a Hudson's Bay Company clerk, who travelled with Chief Factor James McMillan to found Fort Langley in 1827 - Surrey, BC - November 19, 2008

Barnston Island is an unincorporated island located in the Greater Vancouver Regional District, British Columbia, Canada. Most of the island is part of the Greater Vancouver Electoral Area A; the remainder is Barnston Island 3 Indian reserve, which is outside Electoral Area A limits. Although the island is unincorporated and not officially part of any municipality, mailing addresses on the island use Surrey as the city name.

Located in the Fraser River between Surrey and Pitt Meadows, Barnston Island was named in 1827 for Hudson's Bay Company Clerk George Barnston. The island has no direct road access to the rest of the area. It is accessed through a short 5-minute ferry route from Surrey on 104 Avenue across Parson's Channel; the ferry ride is free. Barnston Island's main road travels along the perimeter of the island.

Barnston Island contains mostly farmland and is home to a total population of 155 persons (2001 census), 46 of whom live on the Barnston Island 3 Indian Reserve, located near the southeast part of the island. Statistics Canada defines the island as Vancouver CMA Census Tract 0251.00 of British Columbia.

________________________________________

The Seagrave Company is the oldest fire engine manufacturer still making new fire engines today. This company was started in Detroit, Michigan, by Frederic Scott Seagrave, a 31-year-old salesman and inventor in Rochester, Michigan, who had some success making wood ladders and selling them to local apple orchards. His ladders used wire trusses, making them sturdier than most wood ladders of that day.

In 1880, a local volunteer fire department asked Frederic Seagrave to build a hand-drawn wagon and some of his well-known sturdy ladders for firefighting. His first few hand-drawn ladder wagons were on two wheels. The following year (1881), Seagrave & Company was established, making four-wheel fire department ladder trucks in a new factory at 418 Michigan Avenue, Detroit. These ladder trucks could carry more ladders than the two-wheel carts, and required two or three horses to haul them to fires.

The same year that F.S. Seagrave established his fire engine factory, in 1881, he also applied for his first patent on his trussed ladder system. Patent #278,051 was granted to him on May 22, 1883. Over the next 20 years, Frederic S. Seagrave would greatly improve his truss system for wood ladders (for example, eliminating the truss wires), vastly increasing their strength and rigidity, and reducing their overall weight, compared to conventional wood ladders. Seagrave also invented and patented numerous other fire apparatus improvements during those first 20 years.

Within its first ten years, Seagrave & Company had expanded from making ladder trucks, to also making hand-drawn and horse-drawn hose carriages and chemical engines, with two or four wheels. By 1891, demand for Seagrave's diverse line of fire apparatus had outgrown the capacity of the Detroit plant, and Frederic Seagrave began to move operations to a new two-story brick factory on West Lane Avenue in Columbus, Ohio. The move from Detroit to Columbus took two years to complete.

In 1898, the success of Seagrave fire engines attracted the notice of Julius Stone, a Columbus banker who owned the Ohio Buggy Company. Seagrave and Stone formed a partnership, and renamed the company from Seagrave & Co. to The Seagrave Company.

In 1902, Julius Stone bought out Frederic Seagrave's share of the partnership, and the company moved again, this time into Stone's former Ohio Buggy Company at 2000 South High Street, also in Columbus, Ohio. This factory, conveniently located on the main railroad freight line through downtown Columbus, let Seagrave ship its fire engines all over the U.S., and indeed all over the world. 2000 South High Street would be Seagrave's home for the next 63 years, doubling its number of buildings from two to four in 1910, and adding yet two more buildings in 1928. This complex is still home to one of Seagrave's corporate successors.

In 1901, Frederic Seagrave, and his son Warren Edmund Seagrave, established the W.E. Seagrave company at Walkerville, Ontario, to build and sell Seagrave fire engines in Canada. When F.S. Seagrave sold out his Columbus operations to Julius Stone a year later, he retained the right to build and sell Seagrave fire engines at the Walkerville plant. Always the inventor, Frederic Seagrave developed new types of aerial ladders and water towers from this Canadian plant, and some of these Canadian innovations would later become the basis for fire engines built at the main Columbus plant.

In 1902, the same year that Frederic Seagrave sold out his interest in the Columbus fire engine operations to Julius Stone, another event was occurring in Columbus that would eventually have a profound impact on the Seagrave company. For in 1902, two local inventors, Lee A. Frayer and William Miller, began building autombiles in Columbus. In 1905, Frayer-Miller built the first six-cylinder automobile in the U.S., rated at 36 horsepower. In 1906, a 4-cylinder Frayer-Miller was one of the few cars to complete the Vanderbilt Cup cross-country auto race. An unusual feature of the Frayer-Miller was that it was air-cooled, so there was no water in the radiator, to freeze up and crack the engine block during those cold Ohio winters.

In 1907, Oscar Lear, a Columbus-based promoter of new inventions, was impressed enough with Frayer-Miller's cars to join the company and start marketing these cars aggressively. He approached the management of Seagrave about building a fire engine on a Frayer-Miller automobile chassis. Why Seagrave? First, Seagrave was in the same city (Columbus) as Frayer-Miller. Second, Seagrave was one of the biggest and best-known fire apparatus manufacturers in the United States. But there is also evidence that Seagrave already had some connection with Frayer-Miller two years earlier, when Seagrave offered four-cylinder, air-cooled autombiles as fire chief's cars in the September 5, 1905, issue of Fire Engineering magazine. So it was a natutral choice to have Seagrave market hose wagons and chemical cars on Frayer-Miller chassis.

And thus the Seagrave Company became one of the first manufacturers of horse-drawn fire engines to offer gasoline-powered fire engines. On June 27, 1907, the very first Seagrave/Frayer-Miller fire engine, a hose wagon with four-cylinder, 24-horsepower motor, was driven 50 miles from the Columbus factory to Chillicothe, Ohio, and returned by a longer route, 55 miles back to Columbus, with fire chiefs from all over southern Ohio and northern Kentucky on board. The entire 105-mile trip took 8 hours and 17 minutes, averaging 13 miles per hour.

The Frayer-Miller automobile was not beefy enough for practical use as a fire engine. So Frayer-Miller engineers created a stronger chassis frame, a larger clutch, and increased the air flow for cooling. Besides its use in Seagrave fire engines, this redesigned Frayer-Miller became the basis for a new line of Frayer-Miller commercial trucks, complementing the company's traditional automobile line. By year's end 1907, Seagrave was cranking out motorized hose wagons and chemical cars for customers all over the U.S. and Canada.

In 1908, Seagrave developed a massive tractor for hauling aerial ladder trucks and water towers. This tractor bore no resemblance to any commercial truck that Frayer-Miller had ever built, but it did use the F-M air-cooled 6-cylinder engine.

Frayer-Miller went bankrupt in 1909. Seagrave then acquired the manufacturing rights to the Frayer-Miller air-cooled engines. They also acquired the remaining inventory of unsold Frayer-Miller cars, and repackaged them as fire chief's cars and police squad wagons. The rights to Frayer-Miller's commercial truck designs were sold to the Kelly-Springfield Company of Springfield, Ohio, a well-known tire manufacturer. Frayer-Miller trucks, renamed Kelly-Springfield, continued in production until 1928.

By 1910, W.E. Seagrave in Canada was also building the Frayer-Miller based motorized hose wagons, chemical cars, and tractors. In 1917, W.E. Seagrave also expanded into building commercial trucks, powered by water-cooled Waukesha and Hirschell-Spillamn engines. These trucks could haul loads up to 3-1/2 tons. That same year, Seagrave of Canada built the first commercial truck in North America to be powered by a V-8 engine.

By 1911, Seagrave realized that air-cooled engines were not practical, and introduced their own water-cooled four-cylinder and six-cylinder T-head engines. The air-cooled engine continued to be available for a few more years, before it was phased out in favor of water cooling. Seagrave model designations made the distinction by using AC for Air Cooled and WC for Water Cooled as part of the model number.

Most fire apparatus manufacturers in the first three decades of the 20th century used positive-displacement fire pumps, either of the piston or rotary type. These pumps were extremely quick to pick up water, and could apply tremendous pressure to move water through long hose lines. But they had the drawback of having a lot of moving parts, which could and did easily break down. Also, there was a practical upward limit to the size and capacity of positive-displacement pumps, before the sheer weight of all those moving parts required more engine power than was practical in a truck.

In 1911, Seagrave teamed with the Gorham Fire Apparatus Company of Oakland, CA, to build America's first fire engine with a centrifugal pump, and it was successfully tested in Oakland on July 27, 1912. Seagrave would promote the advantages of centrifugal pumps (fewer moving parts, lighter weight, less maintenance, and virtually no upwward limit to pump capacity) for about 20 years, before the rest of the industry caught up to them.

The main reason that the fire service resisted centrifugal pumps for so long, is the fact that they are considerably slower than the positive-displacement types, requiring priming by a smaller rotary pump before they can draw water into the pump. Typically, a piston or rotary pump can suck-up and discharge water in 4.5 to 8 seconds, with 6 seconds about the norm, versus 30 to 60 seconds typical of a centrifugal pump. Centrifugal pumps also have less power, to overcome loss of water and pressure from friction loss in the fire hose, than piston and rotary pumps do. But eventually, the economy and efficiency of centrifugal pumps outweighed these objections. After diesel truck engines became common-place in the 1960s, some diesel-powered centrifugal pumpers could actually EXCEED the power delivered by traditional gasoline-powered positive-displacement pumps.

Today, every new fire engine made in America, regardless of manufacturer, uses a centrifugal pump. Today's centrifugal pump capacities are routinely 1500, 2000, or even 2500 gallons per minute, versus the 1300 GPM limit for the biggest practical piston type, and 1500 GPM for the biggest practical rotary type, fire pumps. In 1965, Mack Trucks built the Super Pumper, with an 8,800-gallon per minute DeLaval centrifugal pump. Today, a stationary centrifugal fire pump in use in Holland has a capacity in excess of 10,000 U.S. gallons per minute. So once again, Seagrave led the way with a new technology (the centrifugal pumper) that would become the standard of the fire apparatus industry.

Julius Stone and a handful of local investors continued to own and operate The Seagrave Company until 1925, when capital was needed for expansion of the factory. A group of investment bankers then bought into the company, and the company name changed to The Seagrave Corporation. Although Julius Stone would continue to be active in this new company, the company's operations would for many years be in the charge of Howard Spain, General Manager.

As with most vehicle manufacturers, the Stock Market Crash of October 29, 1929, and the Great Depression that resulted, had a severe impact on The Seagrave Corporation, dropping annual sales of new fire engines from 300 in 1929 to 145 in 1935.

Always a pioneer, Seagrave intoduced one of the first all-steel, hydraulically-raised aerial ladders in 1935, and began manufacturing fire engines with all-steel safety cabs as early as 1937. Positive safety ladder locks, introduced in 1938, ensured that Segrave ladders stayed in place when used or stored. All of these innovations are a standard part of today's fire engines of all makes.

Seagrave did lag behind some of the industry in a few innovations, however. Although American-LaFrance offered cab-forward apparatus in 1947, and Crown followed in 1951, Ahrens-Fox in 1956,and Mack in 1958, the first cab-foward Seagrave was not until 1959. And although the first diesel-powered fire engine in America (a Stutz) appeared in 1939, Seagarve did not standardize on diesel engines until 1969, preferring to stick with improved versions of the Seagrave V-12 gasoline powerplant introduced in 1932.

The 1950s were a time of great expansion for Seagrave. In 1952, they acquired Fyr-Fyter, a supplier of fire extinguishers and other firefighting equipment used on Seagrave fire engines. Three years later, Seagrave acquired a competitor, Maxim Motors, a long-time manufacturer of fire engines at Middleboro, MA.

In 1957, for the first time, Seagrave diversified beyond the manufacture of fire engines, including divisions that made modular homes, paints, building materials, and there was even a leather processing division.

In 1963, the fire engine division of the Seagrave Corporation was acquired by the Four Wheel Drive (FWD) Corporation, manufacturers of multi-drive, heavy-duty commercial trucks and fire apparatus. FWD had begun in 1907, when brothers-in-law Otto Zachow and William Besserdich, both blacksmiths in Clintonville, WI, developed a four-wheel drive mechanism and fitted it to a Reo touring car.

In mid-1963, Seagrave moved its offices and factory into the FWD plant in Clintonville, Wisconsin, where the renamed Seagrave Fire Apparatus, Inc. makes new fire engines to this day.

The nine other divisions of Seagrave, put together in 1957, were renamed Vista Industries when FWD acquired the fire engine division in mid-1963. Vista continues operations in Seagrave's old Columbus factory. The century-old Seagrave factory on High Street in Columbus is two stories high, and a block long. Although no fire engines have been built there in 35 years, a huge but faded sign still says Seagrave on the wall of the factory, and even the water tank still says Seagrave on it (some of the lettering still shows through the rust on the tank's exterior).

______________________________________________

The Bickle Story
By Walt McCall for the Ontario Fire Buffs Association

It is not generally known that one of Canada's oldest and most famous fire apparatus manufacturing enterprises, the Woodstock, Ontario firm of Bickle Fire Engines Ltd. can be traced, at least indirectly, to a well-known pioneer motor fire apparatus builder in the United States.

Had the wife of Robert Sydney Bickle not come from the family behind the Obenchain-Boyer Co. of Logansport Indiana, the venture that began as the R. S. Bickle Co., and which ultimately evolved into Bickle Fire Engines Ltd. and then Bickle-Seagrave Ltd. and which led finally to the formation of a wholly new company, the firm we know today as King-Seagrave Ltd, may never have been launched. The founders of the Bickle legend were three sons of Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Bickle. Robert Sydney, William Russell, and Beverley Ingersoll Bickle, all born in the thriving South-western Ontario town of Woodstock.

Although, over its half-century of continuous production, Bickle manufactured under licence in Canada the products of two of the biggest and most famous U.S. fire apparatus builders, namely, Seagrave and Ahrens-Fox. Bickle at its zenith produced a complete line of rugged, dependable, distinctively Canadian fire engines in its busy Woodstock plant.

Robert S. Bickle and his wife sang on the concert stage in cities and towns across the United States before Mr. Bickle decided, in 1906, to get into the industrial world. Perhaps due to the fact that he had became acquainted with the fire apparatus business through his wife's family, Mr. Bickle made the decision to go into this specialised field in his native Canada. Thus he formed the R. S. Bickle Company in Winnipeg, Manitoba, with himself as president. Shortly after the firm was founded Mr. Bickle sold the City of Calgary, Alberta its first motorized fire engine. In the ensuing years he built many more self-propelled motorized fire trucks for Western Canadian cities and towns. Among the fledgling firm's most popular products were two-wheeled, horse-drawn chemical carts, that ware particularly suited to the requirements of smaller communities. Many of these rigs remained in use up until relatively recent times, when it became impossible to any longer obtain the hand-made glass sulphuric acid bottles required to activate the chemical system,

Pioneer fire apparatus salesmen in the Canadian west were evidently, a hardy lot. Often, after spending an evening at a council meeting, Mr. Bickle was unable to secure accommodations in smaller places, and no transportation out of town until the following morning. Thus he spent many a night in tiny railroad stations, curled up as closely as possible to the pot-bellied stove, which he sometimes had to get up and stake in sub-zero temperatures several times during the night.

Mr. Bickle carried on his business in Winnipeg until 1915, when he decided to pull up stakes and move to Chicago. The fire apparatus business, however, was moved to his hometown of Woodstock, where operations resumed in a rented building at the corner of Main and Hill Streets. The former home of the defunct Woodstock Automobile Co., one of the many early victims of the new automotive age. Later the R. S. Bickle Co. relocated into a building on Graham St. At this time, W. Russell Bickle took charge of the company and George H, King, husband of the Bickle brothers' sister, joined the firm and headed up its sales activities,

During the First World War the Canadian Government ordered from Bickle a number of two-wheeled fire engines for protection of military camps and installations. Business flourished, and Russell Bickle and Mr. King carried on very successfully until a flu epidemic struck. Mr. King passed away in February 1919, leaving his wife with four children and another Woodstock business called the Canadian Morehead Company, a manufacturer of steam traps.

As there was no one left to carry on the Morehead business, as quickly as he could settle his affairs in Chicago, R. S. Bickle returned to Woodstock to take over both Canadian Morehead, for his sister, and the fire engine company in conjunction with his brother, William Russell Bickle. In an efficiency move the R. S. Bickle Company operations were transferred over to the Canadian Morehead plant. At the same time the firm's name was changed to Bickle Fire Engines Ltd., and Beverley Ingersoll Bickle joined the company, heading up the sales department. Company officers now included: R. S. Bickle, President, W. R. Bickle, Secretary-Treasurer and B. I. Bickle, Sales Manager. Bickle Fire Engines Ltd. expanded rapidly and it soon became apparent that more room was needed to accommodate the substantial volume of business now being handled. In 1924 the citizens of Woodstock passed a bylaw permitting a much larger plant to be erected on Young St., directly opposite the Canadian Morehead Co. plant,

In order to round out operations and to more effectively meet vigorous competition from other fire apparatus manufacturers, Bickle in the early 1920's entered into an agreement with the well-known Ahrens-Fox Fire Engine Co. of Cincinnati, Ohio, which permitted Bickle to build the complete Ahrens-Fox line for the Canadian market. Ahrens-Fox used principally the piston type fire pump rather than the rotary gear and centrifugal pumps sold by most other companies. Ahrens-Fox fire engines sold by Bickle in Canada bore the name "The Canadian Ahrens-Fox" on their step plates. Four of the big, distinctive piston pumpers, with their front-mounted pumps surmounted by a gleaming, spherical air chamber, were delivered to Canadian fire departments. The first went to Kingston, Ontario in 1924 where it remains-today in a place or honour in that city's Palace Road fire station. Three others were sold to Hamilton, Ontario in 1926, 1928 and 1930. Hamilton also purchased a Bickle-Ahrens-Fox city service ladder truck. Bickle-Ahrens-Fox fire engines were soon found in fire halls across the Dominion.

In 1926 the Bickle Co., desiring to have its products better known on the Canadian market as "Strictly Canadian, Built By Canadians", hired Vernon B. King, a bright, young nephew of the Bickle brothers. A recent engineering graduate of the University of Toronto, Mr. King proceeded to design a complete line of custom fire apparatus to augment the apparatus Bickle was then supplying on many makes of commercial chassis. The handsome, dependable Bickle fire engines with their classic gabled hoods and radiators, disc wheels, pleasing lines and distinctive horizontal hood louvers, were offered in four models with pumping capacities that ranged from 350 to 840 Imperial gallons per minute. They were designated the "Volunteer, "Chieftan", "Woodstock" and "Canadian." All components were specially selected for fire service. Fortunately, many of these fine machines are still proudly preserved by the fire departments that originally purchased them, and are highly desired collectors items today,

Bickle-built fire apparatus was available on virtually any truck chassis, from the popular Ford, Chevrolet and GMC to Packard, Ruggles, Kissel and even American-LaFrance, according to a 1930 Bickle sales brochure. The Woodstock plant produced a number of fire engines on the Walkerville built Gotfredson truck chassis. The city of Toronto purchased five big 800 IGPM Gotfredson-Bickle triple combination pumping engines, powered by Sterling six-cylinder motors, in 1927.

Not long after the new custom line went into production, Montreal and Quebec City approached R. S. Bickle with unique requirements for a short wheel-based aerial ladder truck with which to replace the long, tractor-drawn types which had difficulty negotiating some of the narrow streets in those cities. Mr. Bickle contacted the U.S. sales representative for the famous Magirus Fire Appliance Co. of Ulm, Germany. An arrangement was made whereby Bickle would be allowed to import from Germany 100 foot Magirus aerial ladders for mounting on the Bickle custom fire apparatus chassis. Several of these Bickle-Magirus aerials were built, direct forerunners to the compact rear-mounted aerials gaining such wide acceptance in North America today. Montreal bought two-l00 foot Magirus serials, on Magirus chassis, in 1930. These units had wooden aerial ladders. In 1939 Montreal purchased another Magirus 100-foot aerial, this one metal, mounted on a Bickle chassis. The next was a Bickle-Seagrave metal 100 footer placed in service in Montreal's busy No. 2 Station in 1950. This unit was still on the Montreal roster in 1970. The 1939 Bickle-Magirus was scrapped sometime in the 1960's,

Due in no smell measure to the loyalty of its employees, Bickle Fire Engines Ltd. successfully weathered the lean depression years, when orders dropped sharply.

In the early 1930's Bickle Fire Engines Ltd. concluded an arrangement with the Kenosha, Wisconsin firm of Peter, Pirsch and Sons Co. to build under licence in Canada the new hydraulically operated 85-foot tractor type aerial ladder truck recently developed by the U. S. firm. Everything but the wood ladder and patented Pirsch hoist were made in the Woodstock plant. Bickle also built, under licence, the versatile Ahrens-Fox "Skirmisher" quadruple combination. One of these "Bickle Underwriter" quads was sold to Mount Royal, Quebec in 1934.

By this time an alliance with The Seagrave Corporation, of Columbus, Ohio was in the offing. The founder of this large firm, Frederick S. Seagrave, and W. E. Seagrave, had established the W. E. Seagrave Fire Apparatus Company in Walkerville (now part of Windsor) in 1900, to build and sell Seagrave fire apparatus in Canada. This firm built a complete range of horse drawn fire apparatus including chemical hose combinations, hose wagons, hook and ladder trucks and spring raised three horse hitch aerial ladder trucks. In 1907 this company delivered to the City of Vancouver, BC the first motor propelled fire apparatus to go into service in Canada, and air-cooled combination car. But intense competition from LaFrance Fire Engine Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of American-LaFrance, which built a plant in Toronto in 1914, had put W. E. Seagrave out of business by 1919. A Seagrave-Lougheed Co. was established in Sarnia in 1923 but it is not known if this concern ever built a fire engine. In March, 1930 a new company called Seagrave Fire Engine Limited went into business in St. Catharines, Ont., assembling and selling the renowned Seagrave custom fire apparatus line to the growing Canadian market.

Officials of Seagrave and Bickle visited each other's plants in the latter part of 1935 to explore the feasibility of having Bickle take over the production and sale of Seagrave fire apparatus in Canada. On January 1, 1936 Bickle obtained this franchise from Seagrave, and the Woodstock company's name was changed to Bickle-Seagrave Limited, This venture was highly successful right from the start. Bickle-Seagrave could now supply Canadian municipalities with virtually any type of pumping engines, crash trucks, combinations and the biggest aerial ladder trucks. The company was soon the largest in its field in Canada. Its products included the new, streamlined open and closed cab models powered by V12 engines and all hydraulic metal aerial ladders ranging in height from 65 to 100 feet. Tractor drawn aerials, never as popular in Canada as in the U.S., were delivered to Woodstock fairly complete from Columbus, 0hio, but Bickle-Seagrave manufactured most other models completely in its own plant.

The outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 brought with it an urgent demand for firefighting equipment of all types and sizes. The Canadian Government awarded Bickle-Seagrave a contract for 1,000 two wheeled, hand drawn and trailer type fire pumps for civil defence service. Orders also poured in for motor fire apparatus including pumpers, crash trucks, dry powder units and other specialised types of apparatus for the protection of airfields, military bases and harbours. To meet Department of Defence production requirements for speedy delivery of this apparatus, a modern machine shop was built adjoining the main Bickle-Seagrave plant. This permitted the company to manufacture, in addition to rotary type pumps; a Bickle-Seagrave designed centrifugal fire pump and accessory equipment previously purchased from outside suppliers.

With the end of the war and due to ill health, the Bickle brothers decided to retire. In 1945 the company was sold to a Toronto holding company which acquired the rights to continue business under the well-established Bickle-Seagrave name. Business continued at a brisk pace, Among the first post war custom deliveries were a canopy cab pumper for Ottawa. Quebec City placed a large order, which included several tractor drawn aerials equipped with turntable leveller devices. In 1952 the company moved into a large, new plant on Dundas Street at the East End of the city .By far the largest and most modern fire apparatus plant in the country. The new "7Oth Anniversary" Seagrave line, with streamlined grille incorporating the siren, went into production at Woodstock and the company received a large order for Civil Defence training pumpers for the Canadian Government.

But all was not well. Internal financial difficulties were encountered soon after the move into the new plant. In 1954 Bickle-Seagrave was sold again, this time to a Woodstock industrialist who endeavoured to reorganise it and put it once again on a solid financial footing. In an effort to diversify operations and increase production several new product lines were added, the principal one of these was being a highway road sander. Bickle-Seagrave at this time had on hand a number of unfilled orders for fire apparatus to be built on GMC truck chassis. General Motors, however, had been hit by a prolonged strike, cutting off the vital supply of these chassis, and production was curtailed. This, compounded by other financial difficulties, forced Bickle-Seagrave Ltd. into bankruptcy in February 1956, ironically, the company's 5Oth-anniversary year. The big plant was closed, then sold.

Another entirely new chapter, however, was about to begin. Vernon B. King, the man who had designed the highly successful Bickle custom line back in the 1920's, was still very prominent on the Woodstock industrial scene. His truck body and trailer business had done remarkably well, and his plants were among the largest employers in the city. Mr. King was a natural to step in and pick up the remnants of the fire engine business and start anew. Operations resumed in one of his plants within a matter of months, The new company was called King-Seagrave Ltd. It continued to build Seagrave fire apparatus under licence, as well as a full range of commercial chassis jobs built up almost entirely in the Woodstock plant.

In 1962 King-Seagrave Ltd. moved into a spacious new plant on the city's north side. This plant has nearly doubled in size since. Production is about evenly divided between fire apparatus and road sanders. Everything but some custom chassis components and aerial ladder assemblies, brought in from the Seagrave Fire Apparatus Division of FWD Corp. in Clintonville, Wisconsin, is fabricated right on the premises. King-Seagrave began deliveries of elevating platforms in mid 1960. A number of these aerial towers, mounted on heavy-duty commercial chassis, were delivered to Canadian cities, These units were equipped with "Strato-Tower" articulating booms made for King-Seagrave by a division of Paul Hardeman Inc. of Bowling Green, Ohio. In 1969 King-Seagrave obtained exclusive Canadian franchise rights for the famed products Of the Snorkel Fire Equipment Co. of St. Joseph, MO.

Under the Canadian designation of "Sky King", these 50 to 85 foot elevating platforms, "Squirt" master stream booms, and "Tele-Squirt" combination aerial ladder, water tower units are now being supplied in increasing numbers mounted on all types of commercial chassis specified by fire departments, large and small, across Canada.

Pumpers built by King-Seagrave Limited are equipped with Hale pumps. In mid 1972 King-Seagrave took over the manufacture of Duo-Safety fire service ladders from LaFrance, which ceased operations in Canada the previous year. In keeping with the current industry trend most King-Seagrave fire engines are built on commercial truck chassis. The King-Seagrave product line ranges from small, front mounted pumpers, to diesel powered 1050 IGPM jobs, tankers of up to 2500 gallon capacity, 65 to 100 foot aerial ladder trucks with mid-ship and rear mounted ladders, elevating platforms, and quadruple and quintuple combinations of the most modern design. The company is proud of its tradition and craftsmanship and has its own large engineering and drafting department.

Not surprisingly, the City of Woodstock has always purchased Bickle build fire engines. In 1972, a chrome yellow 1050 IGPM King-Seagrave pumper joined the Woodstock Fire Department, perpetuating a proud Woodstock heritage. And the classic 1928 Bickle pumper it replaced, designed by Mr. King himself, awaits restoration and enthronement in a planned King-Seagrave museum.