In February 1871, a used steam fire engine left Philadelphia for Alexandria. If the old story is true, it had a dead fox hanging from its smokestack.
That engine is the reason there’s a firehouse-turned-restaurant at 109 South St. Asaph Street in Old Town. If you’ve eaten at Josephine, or at Columbia Firehouse or Portner’s before it, you’ve had dinner in the house Alexandria built for the company that formed around that engine.
A fox on the smokestack
The Alexandria Gazette told the whole story in March 1921, when the Columbia company turned 50. The engine had been bought in Philadelphia, where it was known as Columbia No. 16, and it came down on the steamer George H. Strout, “arriving here February 13, 1871.”
Philadelphia had just voted to replace its volunteer fire companies with a paid department, and the old volunteers there weren’t happy about it. Here’s the Gazette, typos and all:
Indicating the spirit which the ordinance was regarded by “Old timers” in the city of “Brotherly Love” it is said that while the machine was being drawn through the streets of that city to the boat a dead fox was suspended with it’s head to the smoke stack and on a piece of canvass was the inscription, “Good bye Dan, Ho, ofr Alexandria.”
The jab was aimed at Philadelphia’s mayor, Daniel Fox, for signing the ordinance. Note the “it is said,” though. By 1921 this was a 50-year-old firehouse story, so take the fox with a grain of salt.
The rest of the 1921 account is more businesslike. The engine, a hose carriage and 800 feet of hose cost $3,000. At its first trial, at Cameron and Royal streets, the paper said “water was thrown over the market house steeple.”
Change the name or no engine
The engine came first, and the company came second.
According to the Gazette of March 7, 1871, the city’s fire wardens would only hand the new steamer to a company with a new name. The paper doesn’t say why. The old Friendship Fire Company wanted the engine, and on the night of March 6 its members argued over whether to give up a name that dated back to 1774.
Col. M. D. Ball made the case for change. Better, he said, to change the name “and live and be the crack and leading fire company of the city.”
Friendship voted him down, 20 to 8. So Ball invited anyone who wanted to join a new company over to his office, and once the meeting adjourned, a number of them went straight there. That same night, the group voted unanimously to call itself “the Columbia Steam Fire Company of Alexandria.”
The City of Alexandria’s official history of its fire companies, though, counts Columbia as the successor to a different old company, the Star Fire Company, founded in 1799.
The Star company had a rough Civil War. According to the city, it disbanded in 1863 after the Union troops occupying Alexandria destroyed its equipment. By the summer of 1863, the Army was running its own fire department in town, steamers and all.
“An ornament to the city”
By the early 1880s, Columbia was the company to beat. A letter to the Gazette in February 1883 called it the city’s “crack company,” with one steamer and two hose carriages.
What it wanted was a new house. On March 30, 1883, the city council’s public property committee met with the company’s leaders, and the next day’s paper reported the plan:
The Committee on Public Property of the City Council and the Executive Committee of the Columbia Steam Fire Engine Company had a joint meeting last night at which it was agreed that the lot opposite the company’s present house should be purchased and a suitable building erected for the use of the Columbia company. The plans for the house have already been drawn and when the building is completed it will be an ornament to the city.
The lot was on the west side of St. Asaph Street between King and Prince. Unfortunately for us, the Gazette’s run on the Library of Congress site has big gaps in the middle of 1883, so we couldn’t find who designed or built the house, or what it cost.
The paper picks the story back up that fall, and on November 30, 1883, the company moved in. The Gazette was proud of it:
The Columbia Steam Fire Engine Company marched into their new house yesterday evening, and are now as comfortably quartered and have as handsome and as convenient an engine house as any in the State.
From horses to motors
Here’s the house sometime between 1918 and 1920, with COLUMBIA over the twin engine doors, a tall arched window above them and that bell tower on the right.
The steam era ended in 1920. On February 7 that year, the Gazette reported that a new American LaFrance motor engine was being tested that afternoon. It cost the city $10,000, and the company’s old steamer would go into reserve. Washington’s fire department was making the same switch, which it finished in 1925, and we’ve written about Barney, Gene and Tom, the last of its fire horses.
A year later, in March 1921, the company threw itself a golden jubilee. The Gazette counted nearly 200 guests at the banquet, and it said four of the men who had founded the company in 1871 were there.
The company stayed at 109 South St. Asaph for another 40 years. According to the city’s history of its fire companies, it moved to 900 Second Street in 1961, and it carries on today as Engine 204.
Portner’s, then Columbia Firehouse
We couldn’t pin down what the building did for the next 20 years. A bronze plaque by the door picks up the story:
The plaque says the old firehouse was restored as a restaurant for Marilyn and Harry Lewis, under the direction of James J. Matthews Jr., and finished in November 1981. They called it Portner’s, most likely a nod to Robert Portner, the Alexandria brewer whose beer was advertised in the Gazette back in 1907.
Portner’s was an Old Town fixture into the 2000s. After it closed, the space had a short run as Bookbinder’s, and in July 2009 Neighborhood Restaurant Group reopened it as Columbia Firehouse.
When it opened, the main dining room sat where an alley used to run beside the engine house, under a long, curved glass ceiling.
The name got the restaurant into a scrap with Firehouse Subs, whose parent company opposed the restaurant’s trademark application in 2015. The two sides settled, and the opposition was dropped.
Josephine
Columbia Firehouse closed during the pandemic. On June 7, 2023, the same group reopened the building as Josephine, a French brasserie named for Josephine Baker. As of this writing, it’s still open.
Stand across St. Asaph Street and compare it with the 1918 photo. The arched window above the doors and the two arched openings are still there. The bell tower isn’t, and we couldn’t find when it came down.
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