107
South Alfred Street

The Friendship Fire Company was founded in 1774 as Alexandria’s first volunteer fire-fighting organization — predating the Revolutionary War and the city’s incorporation as a municipality. George Washington Person George Washington b. 1732 · d. 1799 Planter, military commander, and first President of the United States. Master of Mount Vernon from 1761 until his death in 1799, and a regular presence in Alexandria, which he … is documented in surviving company records as a member and contributor of the Friendship Company’s original hand-pumper apparatus.

The current Italianate firehouse at 107 South Alfred Street was built in 1855, replacing earlier wooden engine-house structures on the same site. Two-and-a-half stories of brick over a raised basement, fronted by a stepped Italianate parapet and a square cupola, the building is one of the oldest surviving volunteer-fire- company structures in the United States.

The Friendship Company served as Alexandria’s primary fire-fighting body through the nineteenth century. After the city consolidated its volunteer companies into a paid municipal department in the early twentieth century, the building transitioned to a museum function. Today it operates as the Friendship Firehouse Museum under the City of Alexandria’s Office of Historic Alexandria, interpreting both the fire-fighting history of the early republic and the social-organization role that volunteer companies played in nineteenth-century American civic life.