What “Sparked” My Interest in Fire Towers
It was the McCormick's Creek fire tower that got me interested in their history. Next to the tower, I spotted an informational sign that read, “Many Indiana lookouts were local farmers recruited when the fire danger was high. Sometimes a wife or other family member would serve as a lookout. During World War II, many of Indiana's lookouts were women.”
The sign featured a picture of a woman in 1944 named Leatrice Dotters, a lookout in Sequoia National Forest in California. I learned she started the job at 18 years old and remained active as an advisor for lookouts for over 70 years. That made me really curious. Who were the female fire lookouts in Indiana? Are there any still around today? Thankfully, the answer to both of these questions is yes! I found my answers with former fire tower lookout Teena Ligman.
The Fire Tower Explosion
Teena Ligman is a valuable part of Indiana’s natural work. She’s a board member for the Friends of Spring Mill State Park volunteer group and has worked for the Forest Service for over 40 years. She’s currently Indiana’s chapter chair of the Forest Fire Lookout Association. Teena also served in the military for 24 years, has a degree in forestry, was a fire lookout, and worked in several national forests.
She told me, “Back in the ‘70s – my very first job – I was hired with the US Forest Service, and it happened to be a bad fire season. My workstation was the Eastwood lookout tower in the Mark Twain National Forest in Missouri. I would report in the morning, if it was a high fire danger day, to the top of this lookout tower, and I would spend my day looking for fires. At that time in the Ozarks, we had a lot of arson fires. And so for me, it was a chance to work in a lookout tower and work with the other lookouts and the fire community. And I really loved it.”
Teena gave me a quick history of fire towers in the United States. She said they really took off “when we had the big burns in 1910. And that year they lost over 3 million acres of virgin timber… whole towns were burned over. A lot of people died.” Consequently, over the next twenty years, the Forest Service “put up over 5,000 lookout towers. The peak of how many fire towers there were was about 8,000 nationally.” There are still around 2,500 fire towers across the country today, with some still in use. In Indiana, while they're not all safe to climb on, there are 14 still around today, although they’re no longer used to spot fires.
Teena said decades ago, it was pretty normal for regular citizens to be fire tower lookouts. Part of the intention behind creating them was to develop community fire responsibility. She said, “For a long time, it wasn't the DNR and the Forest Service coming to put out the fires. It was a local community effort, so we had fire wardens, and the fire wardens were pretty much volunteers.” While men were fire wardens throughout the state, the sign at McCormick's Creek showed a woman doing the lookout job in 1944, which Teena acknowledged was unusual for the time and mirrored the changes in our country.
Women as Fire Tower Lookouts
Even in the early 1900s, there were women working as fire lookouts, like Mabel Gray. She was the very first documented female fire lookout in Idaho in 1902. Mabel was the camp cook for a timber company. Concerned about fires, the company owner asked her, after she finished cooking breakfast, to climb up a ladder against a tree, sit in the branches, and watch for fire. He gave her a shotgun and said, “If you see any smoke, fire the shotgun, and then hurry back and tell us what direction to ride in, and we'll go put out the fire.” She did as he asked and prevented several fires from spreading.
Mabel's not the only woman who took on the lookout job. Hallie Morse Daggett was the first female lookout hired by the Forest Service. Born in 1878, Hallie grew up hiking in and loving the Siskiyou Mountains of California. Her father owned Black Bear gold mine there and later served as California's lieutenant governor. He was also the superintendent of the San Francisco Mint.
Years after attending boarding school in San Francisco, Hallie started applying for jobs at the US Forest Service, but not for a clerical position. She loved the forest and wanted to protect it. An opening at the Eddie Gulch lookout station in the Klamath National Forest finally gave Hallie her break. She applied for the job, beating out two other male applicants. Hallie was a lookout for 15 seasons before stepping down from the job.
Teena explained the next wave of women was during World War II when men were fighting overseas. That’s when Leatrice Dotters was a lookout. In the 1960s, many times a husband and wife were hired to work as a team. She would spot the smoke and radio down to her husband who would assemble a crew to fight the fire. Their dual roles allowed fires to be effectively contained.
Indiana’s Georgia Fire
In Indiana in the 1960s, there was also a need for lookouts, no matter their gender. The Georgia fire near the towns of Mitchell and Bedford was the second-largest recorded fire in Indiana. Clarissie Carroll was right in the middle of it.
Clarissie became a lookout because of her husband Clinton’s lack of interest in the position. As a fire warden, he'd been talked into the lookout position too. However, it didn't take him long to think of all the other things he needed to do on his farm instead. Teena told me, “He said, ‘Clarissie, why don't you take over?’ And she loved it.” Clarissie didn’t ask for permission. She later said, “The rules were not as strict then as now. I didn't notify anyone that I was taking over the job of tower man.” That spirit of stepping up – quite literally – defined Clarisse and many other women of her generation. She saw a job, was interested, did it, liked it, and continued doing it well without asking for official permission.
Clarissie ended up being the lookout in the Georgia tower in Mitchell, Indiana, for 20 years, and was there for on November 10, 1964, when the Georgia fire broke out at 2:18 p.m. She saw plumes of smoke along the road, likely set by an arsonist, and called it in. Teena said, “They sent somebody to start working on it, but then she saw the fire spreading.” Clarissie called Carpenter's Body Works, a local factory that made buses, and asked for volunteers to fight the fire. Between the men on the assembly line and others in the community that her husband was rounding up, they had an army ready to go.
Teena said, “Seven hundred people came out to fight that fire. That's how big it was. The fire wardens rounded up a lot of those people. They went and got high school boys. They just pulled up at the high school. Any boy that wanted to fight fire jumped in the back of pickup trucks.”
Unfortunately, part of the fire was on private property, and the owner wouldn't let people on his land. By the next day, the fire had spread further, so the nearby naval base had to get involved. Over the next three days, the community kept fighting back. Every time it seemed like the fire was almost controlled, something would go wrong. The dozers used to create a fire line were stopped by the terrain, the humidity dropped, and the wind shifted. It seemed like the fire was winning.
Even Clarissie and her lookout tower were in danger. Teena explained, “She was in the tower, and she was calling out where the fire was spreading because she had a bird's eye view up there. And Paul Sanders, the conservation agent, came, and he said, ‘Clarissie, your steps are on fire! Get down out of that tower now!’ And she said, ‘I did feel like a smoked herring.’” Thankfully, Clarissie got out of the tower as Paul hosed it down.
Finally, on the fourth day, the fire was finally under control. Then, a few days later, it rained, quenching any remaining embers. In the end, the fire burned almost 2,500 acres of land before Clarissie and the community could finally relax. Clarissie continued her lookout responsibilities for six more years, walking down the steps one final time in 1970. The Georgia tower was taken down two years later. Clarissie was always thankful for her job, a chance to write poetry, watch animals from up high, and do her part to protect her community.
The View From the Top
Fire towers offered anyone a chance to protect their home and their neighbors. Yet even when they were first put up, one of the things lookouts loved most about their towers was not the adrenaline rush of seeing smoke or how quickly they could climb the stairs. It was something we appreciate about them today, the stillness and peace found at the top.
Clarissie Carroll found joy and serenity being a lookout. She said, “When you stand in the tower and survey the beautiful earth, you feel as if you were next to heaven.” Next time you see a fire tower, be a little brave and climb it. But most of all, remember the lookouts and enjoy a little slice of heaven from up in the sky.
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