In 1901, a man named Frederick Messinger moved to the area that would become Briarcliff Manor. He had spent the previous decade working as a fireman in Kingston, New York, and he brought that experience with him. Within months, he and thirteen other local men had organized a private fire company. There was just one problem: the village they were protecting did not exist yet. Briarcliff Manor would not be officially incorporated until November 21, 1902, more than a year after Messinger's company started answering calls.
That gap is easy to miss and worth sitting with. The Briarcliff Manor Fire Department is not a creation of the village government. It came first. The volunteers organized themselves in February 1902, adopted the name Briarcliff Steamer Company No. 1 that April, and only after the village incorporated did the company petition to come under municipal jurisdiction, a request granted on February 10, 1903. The department that will spend three days this October celebrating its 125th anniversary has, in a real sense, been protecting this ground longer than the ground has had a name.
That celebration runs October 9 through 11, 2026, according to the department's own announcement. It is being billed as a Carnival and Parade, and if the department's history is any indication, it will draw far beyond Briarcliff's borders.
Three Companies, Assembled Over Decades
What residents call "the fire department" is actually three distinct companies that joined at different points in the twentieth century. The Briarcliff Fire Company came first, established in 1906. The Scarborough Fire Company followed in 1921, covering the hamlet of Scarborough and, for a stretch between 1930 and 1971, the Archville area as well. The Briarcliff Manor Hook & Ladder Company was the last to form, organized on October 6, 1936, after the Village Board agreed the growing department needed dedicated ladder capability. Charles Matthes chaired that founding meeting, with William Bevier serving as the company's first captain.
For six decades, women were part of this story too, just not as firefighters. The Ladies Auxiliary organized in 1933, with Clara Matthew as its first president, and its members served food and coffee to firefighters at scenes, often in freezing or rainy conditions, and marched in the department's parades across Westchester County. Their trophies from those parade competitions are still displayed in the firehouse meeting rooms today. The Auxiliary dissolved in 1993 and 1994, a shift that happened around the same time women were joining as active firefighters rather than support staff. The department's first fire fought with women on the crew came in 1982, when Debra Ann Conacchio and Rachel Higgins served as firefighters during a blaze that caused an estimated $500,000 in damage to the village's central business district.
Still Entirely Volunteer
Here is the detail that surprises people who assume a department this size must be paid: it isn't. The Briarcliff Manor Fire Department has been 100% volunteer since 1901, and it still answers more than 1,000 fire, motor vehicle accident, and ambulance calls every year. The department's footprint extends past the village line, too. Because of a fire protection contract, BMFD also covers unincorporated portions of Ossining and Mount Pleasant, a reminder that municipal boundaries on a map don't always match who actually responds when something goes wrong.
The department today runs three fire companies and two stations, one at the Village Hall and a second on Scarborough Road, with four fire engines, a heavy rescue vehicle, and two ambulances operated through the Ambulance Corps. Every one of the people staffing that equipment is a neighbor doing it on top of a day job, which is a different kind of commitment than most residents interact with day to day.
That commitment has come at a cost. On May 16, 2007, after a day of storm-related calls, Deputy Chief Joseph Piazzi of the Hook & Ladder Company felt ill and later suffered a fatal heart attack. He was the first member of the department to die in the line of duty. The department memorialized him by naming the apparatus bay at headquarters in his honor, a detail that turns a building into something closer to a record.
What the Milestone Years Have Looked Like Before
If you want a sense of what a 125th anniversary carnival might draw, the department's own past milestones offer a pattern. The 50th anniversary brought a parade with twelve fire departments participating. The 75th anniversary, in 1976, was bigger still: 650 firemen from fourteen companies marched from Willow Drive to the firehouse, joined by women's auxiliaries and roughly 500 musicians from thirteen bands. In 1997, the department hosted the Westchester County Volunteer Firemen's Association Convention for the second time, drawing 43 departments for a parade, golf outing, and annual dinner.
There's also a moment worth remembering from the years between milestones. In September 2001, BMFD was preparing to host that same regional convention and parade for a third time. The events of September 11 postponed it. Instead, on that day, the department sent one of its engines, along with crews from other Westchester departments, to the Bronx to cover FDNY units working at Ground Zero. The convention meeting eventually happened that November, with the parade held the following May.
Given that track record, a 125th anniversary carnival is unlikely to be a quiet affair. Residents who live near either station, Village Hall or Scarborough Road, should expect visiting apparatus, extra traffic around the firehouses, and likely mutual aid companies from neighboring towns joining the parade route, the same way they have for every major anniversary before this one. The department has not published a detailed hour-by-hour schedule as of this writing, so residents planning around the weekend should check the department's site directly for parade timing and any street closures as the date gets closer.
A Department Older Than Its Own Village
What makes this anniversary different from a typical town celebration is the arithmetic underneath it. Most municipal institutions in Westchester trace their founding to a charter, a vote, an incorporation date. This one traces to thirteen men and a hose cart pulled by hand, a full year before there was a village to incorporate. The firehouse trophies, the auxiliary's decades of service, the apparatus bay named for a chief who died answering calls, all of it sits on a foundation that predates the place itself.
That's the kind of detail that doesn't show up on a portal listing or a chamber of commerce page. It shows up in the department's own archives, and it's worth knowing if you're the kind of resident who wants to understand not just where you live, but what was here before the streets had their current names.
If you're settling into Briarcliff Manor and want to get oriented in the parts of daily life that don't come with a welcome packet, from which volunteer company covers your block to which local institutions have quietly outlasted the village itself, Valerie Cascione spends as much time studying this community as she does its housing market. Let's talk about your next move, whenever that turns out to be.
