Community Corner
Your Guide: Mustering, a Blast From the Past
Check out Erik Smith's YouTube video of Marblehead fire crews on the handtub and see a link to the firefighting past.
Saturday at 12:30 p.m. many hands will start pumping at a traditional firemen's muster in Marblehead.
The competition and social occasion will take place at Reynold's Field, near the Charter School.
See glorious antique pumpers made of wood, brass and steel and other materials that have been carefully restored.
The handtub competitions are a link to the past — including the 19th century when the horse-drawn units answered frantic bells and charged from stations, the pumpers in tow.
The horses' hoofs beat against stone and gravel roads in a race against time to stave off impending danger that fire posed to whole sections of towns.
The firemen's muster celebrates the history of firefighting and the present. The antique apparatus shoot a stream of water on an unrolled paper. The longest shot wins.
Marblehead has two teams in the competition, the Gerry 5 in the B Class and the Okommakamesit in the A Class.
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