The Wooden Nutmeg

Perhaps the most unlikely location for a fire prevention activity in the history of the U.S.:

The Scituate monitors helped thwart the Japanese attempts to bomb the United States with TNT-laden hot-air balloons. To keep track of the silent craft, the Japanese placed radio transmitters on aboard the deadly balloons. But the RID eavesdroppers heard the signals, related the information to Washington and U.S. fighter planes were promptly dispatched to destroy the balloons.

In the entire course of the war, only a few balloons penetrated the electronic screen; one landed harmlessly in Wisconsin, and others drifted off into the Canadian wilderness.

Source (archive)

During World War II, the Federal Communications Commission operated a Radio Intercept facility on Chopmist Hill (a high, broad plain) in Scituate, RI. It was considered the most effective of thirteen such stations. I remember driving through this area as a kid in the 1970s and knowing something weird was done here by the odd phone poles you could still see. I’m not sure if the trees are more mature now or the poles have been taken out, it doesn’t stand out as much today.

For a brief time this location was on a short-list of potential headquarters sites for the United Nations, since it was felt the excellent radio communications and the ability to build an airfield there would be natural complements to being the headquarters. Then the Rockefellers donated the land in the New York City and the rest as they say was history.

In the book, “Connecticut — A guide to it’s roads, lore, and people,” produced by the Federal Writers’ Project of the WPA in 1938, I found several references to fire towers.   Here’s some from eastern Connecticut:

Pomfret

Left on this road [Fire Tower Road off of Route 44 in Eastford] to the Pomfret Fire Tower, 1.2m, a steel structure rising 75 feet above the hilltop (alt.822).  From the tower is visible an imposing panaroma of forested hills and valleys, grassy clearings and cultivated fields.

Union
Mt. Ochepetuck is Bald Hill; this area has significantly changed.  The road described may or may not be today’s Bald Hill Road off of Route 190, at the very least Bald Hill Road goes to the summit referred to:

Left on this road, up a steep rocky incline, too rough for motor travel, is Union Tower, 0.5m, maintained by the State, at top of Mt.. Ochepetuck (alt. 1286).  On clear days an excellent view of the country for 200 miles around is obtained from this lookout tower on the highest point of land in the State east of the Connecticut River.

An interesting tidbit was Union, in 1938, was the last town in Connecticut lacking electricity.  I wonder if they had a telephone line to the fire tower?

South Carolina Forestry has this tale on their website:

Beginning around 1930, the Forestry Commission started building a network of telephone lines to link its firetowers with its firefighters. Agency personnel cleared rights-of-way, cut poles, strung wire, and maintained the lines.

Tower operators would spot a fire and dispatch the firefighter by telephone. Some firefighters were even equipped to climb the poles, tap on to the lines, and make reports back from the field.

This may have been the very first telephone service to rural SC; it was certainly the first to much of the state. At its peak, this system consisted of more than 2,000 miles of telephone line. When SCFC changed from telephone dispatch to radio, many of the lines were purchased by local phone companies and co-ops. The last lines were disposed of around 1970.

When the lines were being built, a woman in Greenville County agreed to provide a line right-of-way across her property in exchange for the SCFC’s promise that they would provide her service as long as she lived. She outlived the SCFC’s use of telephones in that area, but the Commission honored their agreement until she died.

Storrs
The Storrs tower needs no description — it is the shelter still on top of one of the water towers at UConn.

Sterling

Right on the gravel road [Sterling Hill Road from Route 14-A], a short distance to the Sterling Fire Tower, a 90-foot lookout visible from the highway.

This tower preceded Ekonk, which appears on the 1943 topographic map of the Oneco quadrant at 670′ elevation about 1-1/2 miles south of this location, which was at 610′.  I presume the new Ekonk tower replaced both the Sterling Fire Tower as well as the Mount Misery Fire Tower in Pachaug State Forest, whose base was at 440′ elevation.  The Ekonk site is now the location of a State Police radio tower that also hosts a number of other agencies from one of the finest radio tower locations to server the New York City to Boston corridor.