KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Soon you will be able to learn more about the history of the Knoxville Fire Department. That's because the department is working on creating a museum that will feature vintage items and artifacts.
Now that the Knoxville Fire Department headquarters has moved to North Knoxville, Mark Wilbanks, the assistant fire chief, has been quietly working on creating a new KFD museum.
"We're kind of changing the lobby into our newest fire museum for the fire department," said Wilbanks. "Our goal is to slowly over time transform this into a public space where folks can come in during the week."
The Knoxville Fire Department Museum was previously located in downtown Knoxville at the old KFD headquarters. Back in 2022, a drunken driver crashed into it. And now, the department is working on opening a new one.
"That downtown space is a great space because it has a lot of foot traffic," said Wilbanks. "But the problem was there wasn't a lot of ability for people to go in and look and see things. We have a lot of stuff that was in storage that we wanted to get out and display and we felt this space was just about perfect for it."
He says currently, the museum is a work in progress.
"We've got some doors to replace. We're working with the public building authority on that. Once we get our doors replaced, we can get our steamer engine over here. Um, you know, we're, we're kind of slowly starting to build some stuff out."
In addition to the steam engine fire truck from the 1800s, there will be other items.
"We've got our dispatch center from our old alarm room that set up across from our fire department headquarters downtown," said Wilbanks. "Not only do we have that but we have a lot of different old um, helmets. We've got badges, we've got paperwork uh from the night, 1920s, 1930s. Everything from daily log books to you name it."
Wilbanks says the goal of the museum is to tell people about the history of the department and for retirees to remember their days working for KFD.
"This department goes back to 1885," said Wilbanks. "So the late 1800s to mid to late 19th century, this department has some booming periods of time. A lot of interesting past about the department and with the city itself, I mean, you talk about the million-dollar fire that happened down on Gay Street. There's a lot of things that's in our very rich history that we're trying to capture that."
He says the museum will hopefully open later this year.
Wilbanks says if anyone has any KFD memorabilia that could go in the museum to reach out to him so it can go on display. If you have any items, you're asked to email mwilbanks@knoxvilletn.gov.
"We're always looking for vintage KFD items and if there's folks out there that have some KFD stuff they wanna donate back to the fire department, we'll put it in our museum," said Wilbanks. "It may not stay on display all the time because we're gonna rotate some pieces in and out. But we've got photographs, we've got all kinds of different things that we're gonna rotate through over time. But we're always looking for stuff. We've got some gaps in our that we don't have things from."