By Nick Woltman
The Pioneer Press
ST. PAUL, Minn. — The men of the St. Paul Fire Department’s No. 3 engine house didn’t have a very merry Christmas in 1874.
After battling a late-night blaze on Christmas Eve, a pair of disgruntled crew members made some disparaging remarks about their supervisor, touching off a “disgraceful” drunken brawl the following morning that left the two men bloodied and bed-ridden, newspaper reports said.
The No. 3 engine had malfunctioned while its crew was fighting the fire. Driver Frank Gruber and fireman Timothy Delaney blamed the trouble on engineer Thomas Byrnes, according to an article in the next day’s St. Paul Dispatch.
The Saint Paul Daily Pioneer reported that “there had been trouble in the company over a year,” pitting Gruber and Delaney against several other members of the crew.
The tension boiled over after this latest incident. Over breakfast, Byrnes and several other members of the No. 3 crew decided to confront Delaney and Gruber “after partaking of several drinks” at a nearby saloon, the Dispatch reported.
The men cornered Delaney back at the engine house, which still stands at the corner of Leech Street and Grand Avenue in the West Seventh neighborhood.
Crew member James Eagan made the first move, throwing a lit cigar stump at Delaney, the newspapers reported. Sensing trouble, Delaney threatened to shoot his antagonists and started toward a cupboard where he kept a pistol. But as soon as he turned around to retrieve it, Eagan bashed Delaney on the back of his head with a steam pipe. Eagan, Byrnes and the other men began kicking Delaney as he lay on the floor.
Gruber, who was at a nearby grocery store, heard about the fight and rushed back to the engine house to help out his friend. As he walked in, Byrnes produced a club.
“You are not going to strike me with that, are you?” Gruber asked him, according to a Dispatch report.
“Oh, no,” Byrnes replied. “I won’t do that.”
But as Gruber turned around to speak with Delaney, Byrnes laid him out with a blow to the side of his head. Gruber and Delaney tried to defend themselves, but they were outnumbered.
The commotion that Friday morning drew as many as 60 spectators from the neighborhood, and eventually the police were alerted. Byrnes, Eagan and the other three “dastardly assailants” were arrested, the Dispatch article said. They spent the weekend in the Ramsey County Jail.
Delaney was able to crawl back to his bed after the melee, while Gruber, who was vomiting blood, had to be helped to his bunk by a bystander. Both men’s faces were swollen and bruised.
Hearings on the fight began the following week. On Monday, “the little, uncomfortable room used for police court purposes was jammed full of curious people,” the Pioneer reported. After two days of testimony, a judge fined Byrnes and Eagan $100 for assault and battery, while crew member Thomas New was fined $40 for the same offense.
___
(c)2015 the Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.)
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.