Howe Fire Apparatus Company

The Howe Fire Apparatus Company was an American fire apparatus builder located in Anderson, Indiana. It was a family-owned company, operated by four generations of Howes.

History
The Howe Engine Company was founded in Indianapolis in 1872 by patriarch Benjamin J.C. Howe. The company built manual and horse-powered fire pumps, and introduced a line of gasoline-powered pumps mounted on horse-drawn apparatus in the late 1890s. Howe delivered an automobile pumper to LaRue, Ohio in 1905, making it one of the earliest builders of motorized apparatus in the United States. The automotive fire apparatus business expanded in the early 1900s and in 1917, the company changed its name to the Howe Fire Apparatus Company and relocated to Anderson. Howe weathered the Great Depression relatively well, although its manufacturing plant was destroyed by a fire in 1936. Nearly a thousand pumpers and trailer pumps were built for the US military during the Second World War, and production expanded considerably in the postwar boom that followed. Howe built mainly commercial-chassis pumpers, but introduced the new Howe Defender on a conventional Duplex chassis in the early 50s and started building aerial trucks later that decade using Memco and Grove devices. A cabover version of the Howe Defender was introduced in the early 1960s. Expansion saw Howe acquire fellow builder Oren Roanoke Corporation of Virginia in 1961 and Coast Apparatus Inc. of California in 1965. Production at Coast ceased, but Oren continued to operate under its own name.

In 1970, a new plant was opened in Anderson and Howe celebrated its centennial two years after that, still run by the Howe family. However, a few years later, the family sold the company, including the Oren subsidiary, to Grumman Allied Industries to form Grumman's new Emergency Products division. The last truck built at the Howe plant in Anderson was completed in 1980, after which Grumman consolidated production at the Oren facility in Roanoke, Virginia. Initially, apparatus were still badged as Howe and Oren, but changed to Grumman in the 1980s. Grumman wound down its emergency division in 1992.