Vigilant Firehouse

The Vigilant Firehouse sports a distinct, wide arched doorway that originally accommodated horse-drawn wagons. Built in eighteen eighty-three, this brick station served the Vigilant Fire Company, one of the volunteer groups that protected Georgetown before the city established a professional department. In the late eighteen nineties, a fire captain named Charles King famously trained his firefighting dog to dash into the station and pull the release cord for the stalls whenever the alarm bell rang, freeing the horses to run to their positions.