Milford History Online

When a blaze was really burning in the early 1900s, the Milford Fire Department would often call on Walter Billings and his speedy horseless carriage. Billings owned the first car in town  — actually purchased by his father in 1902 — and the Oldsmobile was often used for more than just Sunday drives. Case in point: On the afternoon of July 12, 1911, the fire department was alerted to a “fierce forest fire” burning in the plains between Ponemah and South Merrimack. Running out of the station, situated in the back of town hall, fire fighters flagged down Billings, who was soon “at the throttle, with his running orders,” according to the Milford Cabinet. Fire Chief Winslow jumped in the back along with a couple more of his crew. Additional men stood on the running boards while fire fighter William Gangloff rode the “rear mud guard with a grip of death,” in a scene reminiscent of a Warner Brothers cartoon.  

On another day in 1912, the local newspaper praised the “prompt manner” of Mr. Billings as he sped off with the assistant fire chief and a small brigade to battle another blaze. Indeed, throughout the 1910s, the Milford Cabinet kept readers up to date on Billings’s activities. A one-day roundtrip to Boston was news enough to make it into print.  

Certainly, driving on Milford roads in the early 1900s was an audacious enterprise. A reporter from the Cabinet told readers of his hair-raising ride through town in a 1903 article. Concerns included wind gusts, trouble with the crank, lots of “muck and mire,” flocks of hens crossing the road, and the horse-driven buggies that still dominated. The intrepid reporter told how “we reached the boulevard and came down the grade flying. That was fun but we saw in the distance a lone lady driving a horse and our anxiety grew as we approached them.” In this case, the horse did not spook but a self-propelled, obnoxiously loud, moving machine was certainly out of place on Milford roads in the early days of the 20th century.  

Cars would soon come to town en masse and the horse-drawn carriages would become the on-road oddities. By the 1920s, the fire department had a truck to call its own and would no longer be bumming rides off of car owners down the block.