J B Barham Real Estate will be offering the old fire station building for sale by public auction on Saturday, May 10.

It has been 17 years since the building last went under the auctioneer's hammer. On this occasion, while a large crowd attended, the auction was all over in a short time with three people bidding.

The building was eventually sold in 1991 for a sum of $48,000 to Mr Phillip Raggatt.

Shortly after the sale, two students from Stawell Secondary College wrote up a history of the Old Fire Station as part of a school project.

Their story follows:

The old fire station is at 1 Byrne Street and is built on the highest hill in the city and gives excellent views of Stawell. It is a brick building and it housed the Stawell Fire Brigade until the new station was built in 1991.

It consists of a two storeyed building with a thirty foot tower to house the bell. The later additions are a new fire truck bay and a workshop skillion at the rear of the original building room and shower in the workshop. One inside toilet and one outside. The tower which supported the bell has a wooden structure with a roof of galvanised iron and a flag pole ten feet in length.

The Pleasant Creek Fire Brigade was formed in 1866 after a disastrous fire had burnt nearly one block of the main street. There was no fire brigade and the residents had only buckets of tank water to put the fire out.

The headquarters were in a shed near the present fire station. It was named the Stawell Fire Brigade in 1873. A bell was hung on the poppet head of the Extended Cross Reef in 1877 and was over the disused gold mining shaft.

In 1880 plans for a new bell tower and engine house were drawn up by G Inskip. The bell tower was built in 1889 for the sum of three hundred pounds by R Aicheson, but the engine house was not completed until 1883. It cost the sum of five hundred pounds.

The engine house measured twenty four feet by thirty eight feet and had two doors at the front and rear. The top floor was entered from the stairs in the bell tower and a ladder was used to climb to the top of the tower.

The upper floor was used as a mess room and dance hall and had a firemans pole which was used to slide down to the engine room below.

Hoses and reels were stored downstairs and there were two doors at the front and two at the rear. The original front doors have been replaced by two `tilt' doors and the workshop covers the two rear ones.

The firemans pole has been removed, although the opening in the engine house roof is still visible.

In the 1960s, a brick extension was built onto the engine house. It housed another fire truck and has an office at the rear.

The fire station was purchased in 1991 by Phillip Raggatt who uses the ground floor to store six old cars and the upstairs is just storage space.