By Paul Feely
The New Hampshire Union Leader
MANCHESTER, N.H. — When the final master box in Manchester’s telegraph fire alarm system was pulled Friday, an era of service spanning more than 150 years came to an end — not with a bang, but a series of taps.
Eight of them to be exact.
The Manchester Fire Department has officially decommissioned its Gamewell municipal master box fire alarm system, retiring the telegraph fire alarm system that has served the Queen City since it was installed 154 years ago.
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The final box — Box 4647 outside the main entrance of Manchester Collision Center at 150 John E Devine Drive – transmitted for the final time at 1 p.m. on May 1 .
Vinny Gillis, an electronic systems technician with the Manchester Fire Department, calls into a fire alarm dispatcher before the system’s final transmission.
“We’re going to send you box 4647, last master box in the city,” Gillis says. “Final rounds.”
“Firebox 4647, final rounds,” the dispatcher on the other end responds. “Manchester master box system, 1872 to 2026.”
“That’s it, that’s history,” Gillis said. “This system has stood the test of time for 154 years.”
Those “final rounds” closed the book on one of the longest-running pieces of public safety infrastructure in Manchester’s history.
The master box system had its origins in 1872, when city leaders acting on petitions from residents and a special committee contracted with Gamewell & Co. to install the city’s first Fire Alarm Telegraph.
The original network of 22 signal boxes, three bell strikers, five engineers’ gongs, and 15 miles of wire went live on Sept. 6, 1872.
Boxes were located at City Hall, Stearns’ Hotel, Blood’s Shop, the Amoskeag, Stark, Manchester and Namaske mills, Wallace’s Brewery, and on street corners across the wards, according to information provided by Gillis.
The network used a hard-wired telegraph system to transmit numerical codes to the dispatch center after the handle of a street box was pulled. Inside each box is a mechanism reminiscent of the inner workings of a clock, with spinning and interlocking gears.
Signals were sent to fire stations. The signals were recorded by punching holes in “tape” and alarms would sound in the fire stations.
“It’s old copper line,” said Bob Beltz, a Manchester Fire Department technician. “The message is tapped out like Morse Code and sent out along the copper lines.”
The city began removing the red fire boxes around 2004.
“We expedited the process over the past, I’d say about six months,” Gillis said. “In October, we started getting serious with the holdouts in the city; there were about 35 or so. And by the start of this year, we had it down to about a dozen.”
Gillis said the switchover was prompted by updates in technology. Officials believe the last legitimate (non-false) alarm call to come from a street box alarm was in 2000.
“So in a nutshell, this requires point-to-point connections between our central firehouse and every single box,” Gillis said. “And so if any of those circuits are severed at any point along the line, it can take out one box or it can take out 50 boxes.”
The city has transitioned to a radio-based system.
“That system supplies its signal independently of any type of wiring or infrastructure,” Gillis said. “So, for example, if this building loses power and the battery runs out, the backup battery on the panel, that’s one box that goes down versus many.”
Gillis said not all municipalities are getting rid of their Gamewell systems.
“Nashua’s system is alive and well,” Gillis said. “Nashua is going to keep their system. In fact, we’ll probably be donating a lot of our equipment to them. That was another reason why we changed — lot of this stuff is harder to get. It’s expensive, you know, tough to maintain.”
In a statement, the Manchester Fire Department said “for 154 years, that system stood watch over Manchester’s mills, storefronts, schools, and neighborhoods.”
“Fire Chief Ryan Cashin and the Manchester Fire Department extend their gratitude to the firefighters, dispatchers, listed agents, and the Fire Communications Division, whose careful stewardship kept the network running decade after decade.”
© 2026 The New Hampshire Union Leader (Manchester, N.H.).
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