May 4 –

On this day in 1851, future female fire fighter Lillie Hitchcock Coit (born August 23, 1843 in West Point and died July 22, 1929 in San Francisco) 

arrives in San Francisco via the Golden Gate. Lilly was a well-known patroness of San Francisco’s volunteer firefighters and the benefactor for the construction of the Coit Tower in San Francisco.

In 1851, she moved to California from West Point with her parents – Charles, an Army doctor, and Martha Hitchcock. ‘Firebelle Lil’ Coit was considered a true eccentric, as she was often seen smoking cigars and wearing pants long before it was socially acceptable for women to do so. She was an avid gambler and she would often dress like a man in order to gamble in the male-only establishments (a rule of the time) that dotted North Beach.  As a young woman, she traveled to Europe with her mother. After her return, she married Howard Coit, the “caller” of the San Francisco Stock Exchange during an economic boom. They separated in 1880, and he died in 1885 at age 47. 

Lilly was entranced by the sight of firefighters from a very young age. When she was just 15, in 1858, she is reported to have witnessed the Knickerbocker Engine Co. No. 5 respond to a fire call on Telegraph Hill when they were shorthanded, and she pitched in to help them get up the hill ahead of other competing engine companies.  From this time forward, she was considered a official “mascot” of the fire-fighters, and when she returned from her travels in Europe (in October 1863) she was formally made an honorary member of the engine company.  From that time on, she rode along with the firefighters whenever they went to a fire or they were in parades, and she always attended all of their annual banquets. She continued her relationship with firefighting throughout her life, and after her death her ashes were placed into a mausoleum with a variety of firefighting-related memorials.

Coit Tower, also known as the Lillian Coit Memorial Tower, is a 210-foot (64 m) tower in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, California. The tower, in the city’s Pioneer Park, was built in 1933 using Lillie Hitchcock Coit’s bequest to beautify the city of San Francisco; at her death in 1929 Coit left one-third of her estate to the city for civic beautification. The tower was proposed in 1931 as an appropriate use of Coit’s gift. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 29, 2008.   The art-deco tower, built of unpainted reinforced concrete, was designed by architects Arthur Brown, Jr. and Henry Howard, with fresco murals by 27 different on-site artists and their numerous assistants, plus two additional paintings installed after creation off-site. Although an apocryphal story claims that the tower was designed to resemble a fire hose nozzle due to Coit’s affinity with the San Francisco firefighters of the day, the resemblance is coincidental.

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Photo courtesy of wikipedia.com