Wanted: your old fire number sign
By KURT NESBITT — Journal Staff WriterArticle Photos
NEW ULM - A note to rural Brown County residents: If you should see a member of the Knights of Columbus at the end of your driveway doing something that might look like mailbox theft, don't be alarmed - the service organization is simply after your old fire number sign.
The K of C who organized the effort, Lonnie Spaeth, has cardboard boxes in his garage that hold about 450 of those signs. He stores the posts in a separate place.
"They're obsolete," Spaeth said. "My guess is there's 1,000 out there - 1,000 to 1,500 - that's my guess."
The red and white signs were placed across the county by Brown County's respective fire departments many years ago. Some of them even predate the start of the 911 system, when fire calls were answered by workers at local power plants. Those workers used the numbers to dispatch the appropriate fire department.
Advancements in technology made Brown County's fire number signs obsolete in 1999 as the 911 addressing system gave officials a new method to find the locations of emergency calls.
But many of the fire number signs stayed put. Until now, that is.
Spaeth got the idea to pull the old signs from his daily drive to the Brown County Rural Electric Association in Sleepy Eye. He said he noticed the old signs while driving the lesser-traveled roads.
The Knights' mission is to clean up the county, to keep busy and to raise money, Spaeth said.
"The biggest advantage is to people that mow the road ditch. It's one less post to go around," he said.
Many of the signs in Spaeth's garage are slightly faded. Most of them are still readable. But some them have clearly seen better days.
"When I say cleaning up the county, this is what I mean," he said, holding up a post of two signs mangled by a snowplow.
Mangled or mint or somewhere in between, most of the signs the Knights have pulled are made from aluminum and weigh about a pound a piece and have value as scrap metal, he said.
To harvest the signs, the Knights use one member per township and pay for their gas while they're out working. Spaeth believes the club will be able to make a profit after all the signs are collected . He won't estimate how much money the effort will raise because the price of metal goes up and down.
Spaeth wrote to all the township supervisors and explained purpose of the project. Out of the 16 townships in Brown County, all but three wrote back to him and said 'go'. Spaeth organized the project by putting it in the K of C newsletter, talking about it a monthly meetings and by calling people on the phone.
Volunteers go out to pull signs whenever they can find time. They can go out for an hour, two hours or go all day, Spaeth said. Maps of every township are handed out and volunteers circle an address on the map after they pull a sign and cross out the road after all the signs are pulled. Once all the roads are cross out, the job is finished. The project takes an estimated 12-16 man hours per township, Spaeth said.
Out of 10 stops, there is usually only one person who comes out to ask what is going on. The remainder are gone or stay in house. They get the opportunity to keep the sign if they want it, but they usually they don't want it.
"If anybody's home, I immediately talk to 'em, tell 'em what I'm doin' 'caus it's only courteous - because a lot of the time (the signs) are on a mailbox - they think you're stealing a mailbox. And one guy drove out and said, 'What are you doing here! I've had a lot of trouble with people stealing my mailbox!", he said. So I explained it all to him, obviously, and he was fine with that. This one lady said, 'You took my fire number sign. Now what am I going to do if I have a fire?'"
Presently, the Knights have pulled all the signs out of eight Brown County townships. Eight townships remain.
"It's a good start. There's no rush," Spaeth said. "This is one of those projects where there's really no deadline, except when it's snowing and then it's pretty hard to pull when the ground is frozen, so I like to start early in the summer."
The signs in Spaeth's collection were made from more than one type of metal.
"Not only do I find last generation (fire number signs), I find the previous generation also sometimes," Spaeth said, pulling two rusty, square-shaped signs out from one of the boxes. "These are all steel. I might go to the fire department and offer these to them."
Now that he's pulled many of the signs in Brown County, Spaeth said he's figured out what the letters mean. The first letter signifies the township the resident lives in. The first number signified the section of that township.
Each Brown County township has 36 sections, so if the first number is 5, then the sign is from section 5, and the numbers that follow indicate which farmsite in section five the sign corresponds to.
One of the best stories Spaeth has picked up in his travels is from Lake Hanska Township. He stopped at a home where a widow thought the 'LH' on the sign were made to represent her husband's initials.
