FIREMANSHIP TRAINING BUILDING

At the Board meeting of December 9-10, 1954, “President Hilton reported that people interested in the Short Course for Firemen at the Iowa State College have indicated a desire to construct a building on the campus which would provide needed facilities for the short course. It was the consensus that the Board’s attitude would be favorable toward such a project.”¹

On May 26, 1956, the Iowa State Daily reported that “A project involving the erection of a $350,000 building on the Iowa State campus for a firemanship training and engineering extension continuation center was proposed at the Firemanship Training School here this week.” By December 4 of that year the concept had grown larger as shown in the Daily’s story of that date:

The Iowa Fire Chiefs Association plans to ask the 1957 legislature for a $250,000 appropriation to aid in building a $500,000 Civilian Defense and Firemanship Training Center at Iowa State.

Civilian defense officials said that the Federal Civil Defense Administration would supply the other $250,000 for the center.

Iowa State officials approved the plan and agreed to assume responsibility for maintenance if the funds are made available. The proposed center would contain a 500-seat auditorium suitable for conversion into an emergency hospital, a 100-seat classroom, four 60-seat classrooms and an equipment display room.

The center would also have a fire and materials testing laboratory, a paved training yard for rescue work and fire fighting apparatus and a fire station for Iowa State. Civil defense structure such as bomb shelter would be included. A fire training tower would be at the rear of the building.

Those elaborate plans remained dormant for almost nine years, until a state appropriation of $150,000 for the building was made by the legislature in the spring of 1965.² It would then be a much smaller structure than what had been thought about earlier as indicated in the approved project description:

The proposed structure will be one story of steel and load-bearing masonry construction with brick exterior. The building will be air-conditioned throughout. It will house a short course lecture classroom seating 90 at tables or 225 with lecture seating, a laboratory demonstration area in which sprinkler systems, pumps, extinguishers, fire detection equipment, etc., can be demonstrated, and offices for the Firemanship Training Staff of the Engineering Extension Service.³

Construction contracts were awarded in July 1966 and the building was ready for use by the middle of 1967.