Pottsville Fire Company No. 1 (Humane & Phoenix)

Pottsville Fire Company No. 1 is, by constitution, the city’s newest volunteer fire company and, by lineage, its oldest. It was formed in 2024–25 by the merger of two companies that both trace their origins to 1829: Humane Fire Co. No. 1 (organized that year as the “Pottsville Fire Company”) and Phoenix Fire Co. No. 2 (organized as the “Schuylkill Hydraulian Fire Company”). On that lineage the merged company is, as the Shenandoah Sentinel put it on the eve of the merger, the oldest firefighting organization in Pottsville — though the earliest formally documented dates run slightly later: the nineteenth-century county histories of W. W. Munsell (1881) and Schalck & Henning (1907) date the Hydraulian/Phoenix line to 1830 and the Humane line to 1833. ✎

Munsell’s 1881 history calls the Schuylkill Hydraulian the first fire organization in the borough; the company was renamed the Phoenix in 1867. The Humane line, for its part, received the borough’s first steam fire engine in 1866. The merged company operates from the former Humane station at 200 Humane Avenue, renovated in 2025, and runs the apparatus of both predecessors.