Mount Beacon Fire Tower’s storied history
As the weather gets warmer, hiking will begin to pick up at Mount Beacon. The gorgeous landscape is not the only thing to see on the trails. The Mount Beacon Fire Tower is a Hudson Valley landmark with a 360 degree view, sights of New York City and a rich history. Before current technology and communication practices, New York residents had to get creative to stop forest fires.
Laurie Rankin, New York State chapter director for the Forest Fire Lookout Association, became a member of the organization quite naturally. Growing up, her father was a fire tower observer and she would often sit in the tower with him on weekends. She had an extensive knowledge of the history of New York fire towers.
In the early 1900s, logging was a large industry and branches were often left behind. At the time, trains were the fastest form of transportation, but they ran on coal and shot sparks out of their smoke stacks. In addition, there was a period of drought.
“You put all of those factors together and that was our communication system,” Rankin said. “Our communication system was pretty non-existent, so when a fire would start and it was very dry, and we had all of this tinder lying around from our logging, they would become large very quickly. The earliest warning systems were oftentimes things like ringing church bells, so everyone would go and try to stop the fire, but there were entire communities that burned.”
After several tragedies, New York decided to implement a better system to spot the fires and get an earlier warning out to residents. At first, telephones were put at the top of mountains and people were paid to be observers. In the beginning, these workers had no place to stay and sometimes had to climb trees to look out. “Finally they decided they needed these towers up in the air, so they could be above the trees and they could see 360 degrees all around them,” Rankin said.
Many of the original fire towers were made of wood, but were sometimes struck by lightning and burned up. After some of these incidents, towers were built with steel, like the Mount Beacon Fire Tower constructed in 1931.
In the early half of the 20th century, the state added additional fire towers every year. “Part of what they had to do in creating this system was have enough fire towers around to cover all areas,” Rankin explained. “The other thing that they did, which was very unique, was develop circular maps inside the fire tower and the center of that map was always that fire tower.”
The maps were covered in glass in order to stay clean and be easily accessible, so the observer could quickly identify what direction the smoke was coming from. After determining the location, he or she would call the nearest tower to identify how far away it was and give the authorities a precise location to put out the fire. Rankin compared the system to GPS coordinates.
“Then times changed. We had a very efficient system, we had fewer fires, and definitely fewer large fires in the state of New York,” Rankin said. As the way people live their lives changed, the need for fire towers became obsolete in New York. In the 1960s, aircraft became a more common device to stop fires. Towers began to shut down in the 1970s and 1980s.
Fire towers are no longer used in New York. “Many states in the nation still use fire towers for actively spotting fires,” Rankin added. “Some of those big fires you might see on television in the western part of the United States, many of those are first spotted by lookouts in a fire tower. Many of them continue to direct resources.”
Hudson Valley activist David Rocco began volunteering in 2001 to raise funds to restore the Walkway Over the Hudson. When the restoration was underway in 2007, Rocco became interested in another Hudson Valley landmark. “One day I found out about a hike up to the Mount Beacon Incline Railway casino ruins and while I was up there with Scenic Hudson (a local land conservation group), I looked across the valley and saw the fire tower from the south peak. I never knew about it,” he said. “Two weeks later I came back because I wanted to check it out and I saw a sign on it that said ‘Volunteers Needed.’ I climbed up to the top and I got this magnificent view of New York City.”
After this trip, Rocco got involved with the restoration of the Mount Beacon Fire Tower, which was completed in June 2013. Like Rankin, he is knowledgeable about fire tower history.
At Mount Beacon, it is a 72-step ascent to the top where hikers are met with sweeping views of the Hudson Valley. Rocco said there have been issues with people cutting parts of the fence around the tower, which will have to be replaced. “I don’t know where the people come from. It’s just disgraceful because there’s a lot of people who worked so hard on that,” he said.
Rocco mentioned that there is another problem hurting the tower’s history. “The worst problem of all is the graffiti,” he said. We’ve covered it up on numerous occasions, then come back to see it again and again,” he added. Volunteer groups continue to restore and maintain New York’s 72 fire towers, many owned by the state.
