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About this book

Rumsey & Co. Fire Apparatus Works — Illustrated Catalogue, 51st Edition, 1898. 'Rumsey's Celebrated Fire Apparatus,' manufactured by Rumsey & Co., Limited, of Seneca Falls, New York — established 1840, with its apparatus 'in actual service' in over 4000 cities and villages in all parts of the world. This is the fifty-first edition of the catalog of one of America's great fire equipment makers, reproduced complete.

Inside the 78 pages: steam fire engines from Seneca Falls' other great builder — the rival of Silsby across town; hose carts and hose carriages, hook and ladder trucks, chemical engines, hand engines, and the full 1898 line of fire department apparatus and supplies, illustrated throughout with the specifications a fire committee needed to place an order. It is the working fire trade of the Gilded Age in catalog form.

Fire apparatus historians will find a major builder at the top of its form — and the claim of four thousand equipped departments makes this catalog a map of American fire protection in the 1890s. For the antique fire engine enthusiast, the engravings are reference gold: how the apparatus was built, trimmed, and decorated — the painted and striped finish work of the 1890s fire trade lives on these pages.

Scarce in original form — trade catalogs were working documents, used hard and discarded. This 51st-edition survivor is back in print for fire buffs, apparatus restorers, and collectors of fire service ephemera.

Details: PDF digital download, 78 pages.

⚠️ Please read before ordering — about print quality

This is a digital edition scanned from a historical document. The pages were scanned from an original 1898 printing, and the quality of your download reflects the condition of that original scan.

What that means in plain terms: you may see faded text, uneven inking, age spots, show-through from the back of pages, and other imperfections that were in the 1898 original or introduced by the scanning process. These are preserved as-is — they are not printing defects, and they are not something we can fix.

We are not responsible for the condition of the original source material. If you want a pristine modern typeset book, this isn't it. If you want the actual 1898 manual with all its character intact, you're in the right place.