Firefighting in Old Crescenta Valley

As we know, fire is a natural part of our ecosystem. The chaparral and sage that once covered our valley floor was adapted to low-intensity fires that occurred on a regular basis. In fact, the Native-Americans who lived here for thousands of years actually conducted controlled burns on the chaparral to increase the health of the foliage and make the land more productive for hunting and gathering. When the Native Americans disappeared, the sagebrush grew tall and thick. It was only with the coming of the Americans who built homes amid the thick sagebrush that fire became a problem. In the years around the turn of the last century, fire swept across the valley several times. In the late 1800s and early 1900s these fires were frequent, happening in 1878, 1894, 1896-97, 1889, 1907, 1927 and 1933.

The earliest local pioneers in the late 1800s had no organized fire departments. They were on their own. And, as a result, many early homes were lost. Fighting a fire back then was done by hand. If water was available, gunny sacks could be drenched in buckets of water and beat onto or placed on the burning brush, smothering the flames. Also, shovels would be employed to throw dirt onto the advancing flames. 

It would have been very dangerous to stand at a line of roaring flames and employ these crude methods. It was hand-to-hand combat. Many people were burned in these early firefighting efforts. If wind wasn’t driving the flames a backfire could be set ahead of the fire, but those had to be skillfully managed or they would get away. Wind-driven fires would often leapfrog across the landscape, as they do now, and early firefighters would have to chase the fire across the valley.

Later, as there was more traffic in the valley, passing wagons and later cars would be stopped along the roadside. Male drivers and passengers would be “volunteered” to fight the fires and handed a shovel. If the fire was great a wagon or truck would be dispatched to downtown LA to bring back more willing hands.

My favorite firefighting story took place in 1907 when the newly married Hall family carved out a little home and orchard at Pennsylvania Avenue and Foothill Boulevard. Vernon Hall was a forest ranger and was often gone for days. His wife Eudoxie, a pretty little French girl barely out of her teens, was alone in the house when a fire broke out in what would later become Montrose. The flames ran quickly through the sagebrush north up Ocean View Boulevard, jumped Foothill, then careened west, beginning a slow but deliberate march through the sagebrush toward the Hall house. Eudoxie could see the fire coming and her first impulse must have been to run – but run to where? 

Eudoxie steeled herself as the flames crossed Rosemont Avenue, then La Crescenta Avenue. Armed with the firefighting knowledge her husband had described to her, she set up a firebreak from which to set a backfire. With a shovel she quickly cut the firebreak on the northern and eastern edge of their orchard, about where Los Olivos Lane and Cloud Avenue are today, and set a line of full water buckets and gunny sacks in the break. As the fire jumped Ramsdell, she lit the backfire at the firebreak. She ran between the buckets, using a wet gunny sack to beat at the flames she had set to keep the new fire moving east. The two lines of flame converged and mostly extinguished just as a wagon load of men raced up to “rescue” her. Eudoxie was brave … and lucky.

By the teens, a local volunteer organization was formed, the Angeles Protective Association. It was well-organized, both for firefighting and replanting burned-over areas. It would respond to a bell at the Bissell Ranch at the top of La Crescenta Avenue and at La Crescenta Elementary School. In 1923 this group was able to sponsor a county fire department station in the valley and the dangerous job of fighting fires was placed in the capable hands of professionals.