Kenyon has had a fire department for at least a hundred and seventeen years. In 1909 it ran to forty officers and men in three companies, working out of a fireproof hall the village had just bonded for; in 1944 it was fifteen men and two Ford trucks; today it is thirty volunteers and seven trucks on Centennial Drive. Where the public record contradicts itself, this page says so.
1909: forty men, three companies, and a fireproof city hall
The 1909 county history describes Kenyon at its height — three hotels, two banks, a creamery, a flour mill, three grain elevators, a canning factory, an electric light plant, waterworks, an opera house, two weekly papers — and, in the same breath, "a well equipped fire department." A few pages later it says exactly how well equipped:
In the spring of 1909 the electors of the village voted municipal bonds in the sum of $3,000 to be used toward the construction of a new city hall, and the building was finished in October of the same year at a cost of about $12,000. It is a fireproof structure 40x60 feet in size and contains a large hall, fire station, jail, council rooms, etc. … The fire department consists of about forty officers and men under Chief J. A. Kaiserlik, divided into three companies, and thoroughly equipped with fire fighting apparatus.
Franklyn Curtiss-Wedge, History of Goodhue County, Minnesota (1909), pp. 205–206, in the Kenyon Township chapter written by Ralph W. Holmes. Full text at the Internet Archive.
Forty on the roster in a village of about 1,300, against thirty today in a city of 1,894: the department was a third larger when the town was a third smaller.
1933 and 1944: the insurance men count the hose
The Sanborn Map Company surveyed Kenyon in May 1933 and revised its report in May 1944, because fire insurance rates in a town depended on exactly this. The revised report is pasted over the original on the key sheet, and it reads:
Twenty-one words of it carry the whole department: "Volunteer. Paid for calls. 1 chief, 1 assistant chief and 13 men. 1 station." Fifteen people, down from forty in 1909. Two Ford V-8 trucks, one with a 500-gallon-per-minute pump and one with a 50, each carrying a 300-gallon booster tank, hose and chemicals; 1,450 feet of two-and-a-half-inch hose, 300 feet of inch-and-a-half and 300 feet of one-inch. The alarm was a siren and a bell. The report closes with one line in capitals: no fire-resistive roofing ordinance.
The same report explains what the department had to work with. Kenyon owned its water: two wells, four electric centrifugal pumps, a 150,000-gallon reservoir at the pumping station and a 62,000-gallon gravity tank on a 70-foot steel tower standing 112 feet above the business district — the ancestor of the water tower on the skyline today. Five miles of four- to eight-inch main, 42 double hydrants, 100,000 gallons a day consumed, 45 pounds of domestic pressure and 65 pounds of fire pressure. One mile of the town was paved.
On the detail sheets, the department itself appears as a two-storey brick building on Main Street marked "Town Hall & Fire Dept." — the 1909 building, still doing both jobs a quarter-century later, with a restaurant on one side and a store on the other.
The long middle
The department stayed in the middle of town for most of a century. When KDHL interviewed people at the 2017 open house, the building they were leaving was dated to 1916, and an elderly former resident remembered the fire hall being somewhere else again in the 1940s. The 1909 county history and the 1933 Sanborn both put the fire station in the city hall, so the dates do not reconcile cleanly from public sources alone; what is certain is that the department worked out of downtown Kenyon, and by the 2010s out of three separate buildings, because no single one of them held all the trucks.
The hoses tell the same story. Before 2017 they were dried by being laid out on the ground and turned over by hand, which shortens the life of a hose considerably. First-responder service was added on March 1, 2011, when Kenyon First Responders began answering medical calls — the change that made medical work the majority of what the department does.
2017: Centennial Drive
The new station at 620 Centennial Drive opened with a public open house on Saturday, June 25, 2017. Between 350 and 400 people walked through it. Mayor Mike Engel, the city council and the fire leadership cut the ribbon; the Kenyon Veterans Color Guard raised the flag. Inside was a hose tower that dries hose vertically, a commercial washer that pulls carcinogens out of turnout gear, a chief's office, a treasurer's office, a file room, a trophy case of the department's own history, and — for the first time — every truck under one roof. The kitchen had cupboards and no appliances; the firefighters said they would raise the money for those themselves.
KDHL Radio, "Kenyon Fire Hall Open House is a Success," June 26, 2017.
The money for it came through USDA Rural Development's Community Facilities loan, which lends to cities of 20,000 or fewer for exactly this and runs as long as forty years. The city carries the finished building at $2,583,395, and the 2025 audit carries one USDA bond in governmental activities: $2,120,000, issued August 28, 2017, at 0.90 percent, maturing August 28, 2057. The city's own books call the two funds that service it 2016B GO USDA Bond Fire Hall and 2016B USDA Note Fire Hall. At the end of 2025, $1,889,727 of it was still outstanding, and the 2026 levy for the two funds together came to $115,989 — more than the operating levy for the department itself. The last payment falls due in 2057.
2023: the pull-tabs
In October 2023 the relief association wrote to the council. The letter set out what a volunteer department costs the people in it:
The Kenyon Firemen's Relief Association consists of 30 volunteers that donate their time and efforts to the community without hesitation, leaving their families at home during holidays, birthdays, family events at the drop of a dime. … We have outdated air packs we are currently fundraising for and an older tanker truck we would wish to replace.
What they asked for was permission to run pull-tabs and e-tabs at the Municipal Liquor Store, listing eighteen other towns — Wanamingo, Kilkenny, Elgin, Zumbrota, Goodhue, Altura, Cannon Falls, Kellogg, Zumbro Falls, Wabasha, Northfield, Medford, Nerstrand, Pine Island, Mazeppa, Randolph, Morristown, Plainview — where the fire relief association already did. They put up the $17,908 of opening costs themselves.
The council agreed that November, moving the premises permits away from the Kenyon Snowdrifters, who had run them for more than twenty years. Mayor Doug Henke voted no; the Snowdrifters' president warned it would hurt Rose Fest funding. The association's gross receipts went from $163,013 to $1,985,505 in a year. The air packs were bought: $116,805 of SCBA and a $39,640 compressor from Alex Air Apparatus, approved in December 2023.
Now
Thirty volunteers, one chief who is also the public works superintendent, seven trucks, 118.5 township sections and a city of 1,894. In 2024 the department answered 215 calls and gave 3,112 hours to it. In 1909 it had forty men and three companies and a brand-new fireproof hall; in 1944 it had fifteen men, two Ford trucks and a bell. The hall has moved twice and the pumps have got better. The arrangement has not changed at all.
Sources: City of Kenyon fire department page and 2026 fee schedule; Kenyon V.F.D. 2024 and 2025 response reports and the 2025 township fire contract, council packets of December 3, 2024 and December 2, 2025; fire fund revenue and expense summaries of October 20, 2025; fire department standard operating guidelines of February 2021 and relief association by-laws, council packets of November 9, 2021 and June 9, 2026; 2025 city audit; IRS Form 990 and Minnesota Gambling Control Board filings for the Kenyon Firemen's Relief Association; Franklyn Curtiss-Wedge, History of Goodhue County (1909), pp. 205–206; Sanborn Map Company, Kenyon, Minn., May 1933 revised May 1944, Library of Congress; KDHL Radio, June 26, 2017; USDA Rural Development, Community Facilities Direct Loan and Grant Program. Compiled September 14, 2026. This site is independent of the City of Kenyon and of the fire department.