10/05/2026
Some really neat history for you today.
Morning reading. Random find from Cleveland County. That's Grover Fire Chief Joe Boheler in a Charlotte Observer story from July 14, 1975. "Grover Dispute Ends; Firemen Back on Duty." The story of a conflict between town officials and a fire department serving the town, and its resolution. It's a tale as old as time. Transcription below, via ChatGPT.
And with a later-decade WNC Fire Pics photo of the reference engine, a 1973 Ford F-750/Howe HR-72, 750/750, serial #13867. Andrew Messer took the picture. Source: https://www.wncfirepics.com/NorthCarolina/ClevelandCounty/Grover-Rural/
By WAYNE NICHOLAS
Observer Staff Writer
GROVER — A hot afternoon sun sent a hush over the cornfields and textile mills and little rows of brick buildings of this Cleveland County community.
Then the alarm atop the squat, yellow firehouse wailed and the quiet of the small town of about 500 people in the flat country along the North Carolina–South Carolina border evaporated.
As it turned out, it was a false alarm. But the important thing was that last week, for the first time in 39 days, Grover had a fire department to respond to any kind of alarm.
For 39 days, the town’s 11 volunteer firemen had a running dispute with the city council, and the firemen had called it quits.
Two years ago, Grover had purchased a sassy, new yellow fire truck, then went about building a new station big enough to house it. But according to Joe Boheler, the 32-year-old fire chief, contractors left an annoying amount of work undone. The hot water heater wasn’t installed and the lights in the bathroom wouldn’t turn on.
In addition, the firemen thought the city should cut the grass around the new station. Boheler said he told the councilmen informally about the problems but never got any results.
Finally the town’s sole fire alarm broke and stayed broken until Boheler and a friend decided to take it down and have it fixed.
But when the alarm was repaired, Boheler said he ran into more troubles. The fire chief said he wanted the alarm installed over the new firehouse where his men would be able to hear it better. The council told him it was having difficulties getting someone to install it.
With these problems still simmering, the council adopted an ordinance prohibiting the volunteers from taking the new truck outside Grover’s boundaries on mutual-aid calls without the permission of two councilmen (or one councilman and the mayor) and the fire chief.
This, in effect, barred taking the truck outside Grover, Boheler said, because he simply wouldn’t have time to call two councilmen before going to a fire.
But the councilmen maintained that the state’s fire insurance rating bureau requires that a first-line fire truck be maintained within the town limits at all times.
“We’ve got friends living right outside the city limits,” Boheler said. “Why should we just sit there and watch their houses burn?”
BESIDES, he said, Grover sometimes goes for as much as six months without a fire, long enough for his men to become rusty at firefighting and to lose interest in it. They actually learned fire fighting techniques from seeing other firemen fight blazes on the mutual-aid calls outside Grover, Boheler said.
The chief also said the ruling would prevent his firemen from getting to some locations within the city limits. For example, he said, Mayor C. Franklin Harry—who voted for the ordinance—lives within Grover, but the road leading to his house juts outside the city limits.
The firemen asked the council for a session to thrash out their differences. A meeting was set for a Monday night in May.
“But that’s the night they had a funeral here in Grover, and I told Joe I couldn’t make it,” said councilman M. E. Camp, who is Boheler’s father-in-law.
A SECOND MEETING was scheduled for May 29, but, according to Boheler, only two members of the four-man council showed—Camp and W. W. McCarter.
Boheler charged McCarter came to the meeting “in the sourest disposition,” scolded the firemen for disagreeing with the council and abruptly left.
At that point the 11 volunteers gathered up their keys to the firehouse, put them on a ring and handed them over to Camp.
Angry statements from Mayor Harry, which were later denied, appeared in area newspapers, charging Boheler with considering the new fire truck his “personal toy” and saying that it was time to determine whether the council was running the fire department or the fire department was running the council.
“Somebody said something,” Camp recalled, “and that got into the paper and somebody else said something else and that got into the paper. Pretty soon it got ridiculous.”
AS THE DISPUTE simmered, Mayor Harry appointed new firemen to take the place of the volunteers who had quit, but on July 4 Mother Nature stepped in and put an end to the argument.
A bolt of lightning hit a transformer in the heart of town, knocking two live wires into a tree beside the stately white house of Beauford Hambright and setting the tree ablaze. The Cleveland County fire dispatcher signaled the Grover fire department to come to the rescue. No firemen showed up, but 50 or 60 townspeople did.
Boheler, who was among the spectators, observed the crowd was angry over not having a fire department that could come to a fire only blocks away from the station.
At that point, Fire Station No. 3 from the Earl area of Cleveland County was called to the scene.
It was enough to prompt the councilmen and the old volunteers into talking out their differences.
BOHELER ASKED Jerry C. Ausband, the editor of the Shelby Daily Star, to moderate the meeting that was held last Monday night. The Star had published editorials urging the firemen and the council to settle their dispute for the town’s sake.
By the end of the session, the council had agreed to fix up an old truck so that the firefighters could go out of town on mutual-aid calls and leave the new truck in Grover for local emergencies. Among other things, the brakes on the 20-year-old truck had expired and its valves were shot.
The councilmen also agreed to let the firemen use the new truck outside the city limits until the old truck was repaired, to start work toward buying a third truck and to outfit the volunteers with protective clothing.
THE MEETING ended after about three hours with councilman McCarter handing Boheler back the keys to the firehouse.
The following day, neither councilman R. E. Hambright nor councilman McCarter wanted to talk about the whole episode.
“I’m just happy our differences have been settled,” McCarter said. “We’ve all been lifelong friends.”
And when the volunteers began to trickle back to the firehouse, they discovered that the town’s fire alarm had been installed over the building, the hot water heater was working and the bathroom lights flicked on and off. Even the firehouse lawn had been mowed.
Tags: Grover Rural Volunteer Fire Department
