It was just over a hundred years ago, when in December of 1923, Charles B. Tammany agree to carve out a small piece of land from a larger twelve-acre tract his wife Sarah owned on the eastern side of Sport Hill Road to sell to the Easton Volunteer Fire Company Number One. Measuring only fifty feet in width and three hundred and twenty-three feet in depth, it would be the spot where the two-year-old, all-volunteer company would build its first firehouse.
Beginning in 1908, Charles Tammany first started selling feed and grain in one of the old barns across the road from his new wife’s house at today’s 439 Sport Hill Road at the corner of Banks. That house had been built by one of Easton’s first residents, Daniel Jackson, in 1780. During the first two decades of the 1900’s, Center Road ran west from Banks Road, and didn’t yet connect directly with Sport Hill. Because of the location of Tammany’s business and homestead across the way, the area soon became referred to as Tammany’s Corner.
In 1924, there was a small parcel of land that the Tammany’s still owned between George Halzack’s recently completed country store and the proposed firehouse. It was exactly sixty feet in width and a similar three hundred and twenty-three feet in depth to the firemen’s plot next door.
On January 11, 1924, Sarah Tammany sold that parcel to Andrew Madsen of Trumbull. Andrew Miller Madsen was born in Denmark in 1885. He emigrated to the United States in 1906. Married to fellow Danish immigrant Anna, they produced two children, Maria and Dorothy, twins born on August 2, 1912.
Madsen was a blacksmith by trade. He was employed in that capacity during the First World War by Simon Lake’s Torpedo Boat Company in Bridgeport. The company built early submarines for the United States and earlier, for the Russian government.
While no records can be found on Anna after 1910, Andrew’s application to become a naturalized United States citizen in 1921 shows him declaring that he was then divorced and raising his two young daughters by himself. Census reports from 1920 show he and his daughters residing in a boarding house in Trumbull and Andrew still employed at Torpedo Boat.
What brought the thirty-nine-year-old blacksmith to Easton in 1924 will likely never be known. Nor will the circumstances that led to him being able to accumulate enough money to buy that parcel of land and then build a forty foot by sixty-three-foot, two-story cement block building with an automobile repair garage on the first level, as well as a large apartment on the second floor where he and his two daughters would reside for the next eleven years. The transaction recorded with Town Clerk, Charles Beers (Easton Land Records volume 13, page 256) shows the transfer between Tammany and Madsen taking place for a dollar; an amount that would indicate an all-cash transaction for an undisclosed amount that neither party wanted to share with the rest of the world.
The single bay, two story firehouse next to Madsen’s property would be completed by the first week of January in 1926 and remain the home of the department until 1989 when it moved into its present building at One Center Road. In May of 1925, the department secured a promise of a $4,000 mortgage and began construction in earnest. One of the requirements the members considered essential was that the new building be electrified, but electric lines hadn’t yet been run that far north along Sport Hill Road. To accomplish that goal, the volunteers had to subscribe $250 additional dollars towards the installation of electric lines to reach the new building. Among other means, the department held fundraisers, including holding Saturday night dances with music provided by local orchestras.
After completion in early January, for its first event the new firehouse hosted the local Boy Scout troop’s winter play in February 1926. The firehouse would then become a permanent replacement for smaller Osborn Hall that occupied the second floor of the then Ruman Brother’s Store (toady’s Greiser’s). The fire company would later expand the building by adding an additional bay in 1947 after the company purchased a second fire truck, a new 1946 Mack.
At the same time, Andrew Madsen was selling gasoline from the two pumps he had installed in front of his business, while also running an automobile repair shop inside. He was also able to obtain a license from the state to sell new automobiles. In 1926, there were no franchised dealerships as we know them today, only distributors who had contracts with the manufacturers to sell their vehicles. Distributors could then wholesale their products to anyone else who was willing and able to act as a retailer and repair garage. While there is evidence that Madsen had such an arrangement with a distributor, we have been unable to determine what brand(s) he might have carried and how many vehicles he might have sold.
In 1935, according to Easton Land Records (volume 18, page 109), Madsen suddenly returned ownership to Sarah Tammany “with the buildings thereon standing.” Why he chose to do this is a mystery, but later that year, Madsen was recorded as living with one of his daughters and her husband in the Brooklawn section of Fairfield. He listed his occupation as “blacksmith”, but no employer was given. Whether it was an illness or a simple business failure during the height of the Depression will likely never be known.
What Madsen’s former garage was used for between 1935 and 1944 when Sarah again sold the property, this time to Stephen Burroughs, is a matter of pure speculation. Anecdotal accounts include the downstairs being used as a machine shop that produced parts for automobiles and trucks. It is possible that Burroughs, who founded the Nite-Bright Sign Company on James Street in Bridgeport a year later in 1945, was considering the old Madsen Garage as a possible site for his new business. It is also possible that he simply saw it as a good business investment since Easton’s zoning laws had been codified in 1941 to prohibit additional land and buildings being added to an already extremely limited number of commercial properties.
In any event, Burroughs leased out the building and apartment for several years. By 1953, Valdmar Hair was operating a business on the first floor, calling it Trumbull Electric. He later created a second business at the same address, calling it Easton Plumbing and Heating. At some point in time – likely the mid-1950’s, Hair purchased the property from Burroughs. Shortly thereafter, his wife, Frances, opened a ceramics shop alongside Trumbull Electric on the first floor. The upstairs apartment was rented out to tenants as a residence.
At least one other ceramics business ensued between 1957 and 1960 when the business became Kay’s Ceramic Studio. That same year, the property was sold to Stephen “Skipper” Toth who ran both a bus transportation business from part of the property as well as a driving school. He continued to rent out the front of the business to Kay’s Ceramic Studio which closed sometime in the mid-1970’s.
In 1971, Bernard, Irving, and Milton Gold, the owners of Gold’s Delicatessen in Westport, purchased the property on either side of the firehouse from Stephen Toth for $87,000. Exactly what their intentions were is today unknown, but there is a strong possibility that they may have been contemplating opening another deli in Easton.
The last entity to take possession of the property while the old Madsen Garage building was still standing was in 1974. John Beitman acted as a trustee for a group of investors that included the Golds (Easton Land Records volume 61, page 184). The intention at that time was to tear down the old garage on one side as well as the old barns on the other and build additional retail stores – including a bank, on both sides of the firehouse. Underestimating Easton’s resolve to keep the town from being further developed, the group met with one denial after the other.
By the mid-1980’s, the fire company had outgrown the original firehouse. It had more equipment than it could house in the original firehouse and the separate garage that had been added behind the building. After voting to build a new structure on Center Road, a much larger building replaced the original and once the company had moved everything into the new firehouse, the town purchased the original building for $300,000 for use by the Easton EMS.
In 1992, the Town of Easton condemned Madsen’s old garage and the three old barns on the northern side of the firehouse. Will Tressler stepped in to save one of the barns by disassembling it and moving it to his property on Bibbins Road where it still sits today. The garage was leveled, and the lot cleaned up.
