John Bowman shook his head when asked how long ago the Po-Mar-Lin Fire Co. began planning for a new firehouse in Unionville.
"Thirteen years ago," Bowman, the all-volunteer company's assistant chief, said yesterday. "Everybody says 13 is unlucky. But for us, it's a good number."
After all that time, including six years of fund-raising dinners and private donations, a new $2.6 million fire station, under construction on Route 82 since the fall, is scheduled for completion next month.
The fire company hopes the new building, fronted by a 35-foot brick tower bearing the company's iron-cross logo, will give Po-Mar-Lin a higher profile in its growing southern Chester County community, and prompt financial donations to pay off a $1 million mortgage and a new wave of volunteers to answer about 250 calls per year.
"It's the old theory that you build it, and they'll come," Fire Chief Ricky Tuel said during a tour of the 14,000-square-foot station.
Teams of masons, electricians, roofers and other builders swarmed over the project yesterday. Construction superintendent Allen Lyons of Lancaster-based CH&E Construction said work was going smoothly under the hot sun.
The name Po-Mar-Lin is a collection of syllables from the names of the townships the fire company covers - Pocopson, East and West Marlborough, and Newlin.
Recruiting and keeping volunteers has become a chronic problem for suburban fire companies. The roster of active Po-Mar-Lin volunteers has shrunk by half - to about 15 - in the last three years.
Tuel, 36, a local garden nursery owner, and Bowman, 58, a supermarket worker, link the decline to growing demands on family time, residents' long commutes to jobs in Wilmington and Philadelphia, and the cramped state of their old firehouse, which was last updated in 1982.
In that squat facility, four fire trucks are crammed into two garage bays. A fifth truck used to be accessible only by climbing through one of the other trucks. Volunteers have only a basement room for congregating. And the original 1947 portion of the building has served as the Unionville Post Office for the last 14 years.
The small fire hall is still rented regularly for private parties, and to a church group that meets every Sunday. Due to a shortage of volunteers to call the numbers, fire company bingo games ended seven years ago. The electric bingo board hangs, dark, on the wall.
"With the growing population, the growing number of houses in the several townships... they did need to expand," said Cuyler H. Walker, chairman of the East Marlborough Township supervisors.
The Po-Mar-Lin station is in Walker's township, which he said has grown by at least 500 houses in the last decade - an increase of about 25 percent.
Walker called the fire company "critical to the vitality of the community," and said East Marlborough participated in the effort by donating about three acres for the firehouse.
Another acre was donated by the fire company's president, Jack Singer, who owned a rental house next door to the old station. The house was demolished at the start of work on the site last fall.
The fire company will continue to rent out its old station, Tuel said. "$5,000-a-month mortgage payments are going to come up and hit us in January," he said.
Distributed by the Associated Press
