334 – Fire House from Mühledorf BE, 1834

One such measure for fire-fighting was this fire depot from Mühledorf. In 1833 the community voted to buy a hand-pumper. A year later they bought a piece of land to build the “little fire house” as it was then called: a garage for the portable pumper. When the endangered building was transported to the Ballenberg Open-Air Museum in 1998 it was empty. In place of the original equipment there is a 1902 hand-pumper from Bernese Rüeggisberg with some accessories such as a leathern water bucket for bucket brigades and fire hooks for tearing burning timbers out of the fire. These objects demonstrate the limited means that the people then had for combatting the racing fury of the flames.