1927 Seagrave

This 1927 Seagrave Suburbanite was the first commercially built vehicle purchased by the newly incorporated Bedford Fire Department. Seagrave was started by Massachusetts native Frederic Seagrave. Born in 1849, he moved to Michigan as a young man and began making wooden ladders for apple orchards. His ladders quickly became a favorite among regional fire companies, and, by 1881, Seagrave & Company had been organized in Detroit as a supplier of fire apparatus. A decade later, the company was relocated to Ohio where its first motorized apparatus was developed in 1906. Seagrave was the second largest manufacturer of fire trucks when it announced the Suburbanite truck in 1923. As the name suggests, it was designed for small urban towns and villages, featuring a svelte-yet-strong chassis fitted with a 70-hp Continental six-cylinder engine, three-speed Brown-Lipe manual transmission, and 350-gpm water pump. For 1926, the line was upgraded with a 90-hp Continental that permitted a 500-gpm pump, helping make the Suburbanite one of the company’s most popular trucks at that time.