San Antonio Fire Museum Society

The Museum continues to benefit from the increase in San Antonio tourism following the pandemic. Visitor count was up 26% over the previous 12 months - 9,924 versus 7,888. During our hours of operation (tuesday thru saturday, 10am to 4pm), our all-volunteer staff greeted visitors, telling them the history of the Museum and sharing first-hand experiences of their firefighting experiences. Our docents, who are mostly retired San Antonio firefighters, are frequently mentioned in visitors' online posts as the high point of their visit. The Museum's educational committee offered to scheduled groups Fire safety presentations. Our collections group received numerous donations which were catalogued and either stored, or used in enhancing our diplays and exhibits. Our antique Fire trucks participated in several parades in San Antonio and surrounding areas. Volunteer hours for the fiscal year totaled 12,000. We remain in a strong financial position thanks to the continued generosity of our members and supporters. Significant strides were made during this fiscal year to expand our displays and educational offerings. The Museum currently occupies only one of three floors in the historical central Fire headquarters built in 1939 in downtown San Antonio. Our future plans include expanding our display and educational offerings into the second floor and utilizing the basement for office space and long-term storage. This will require a signficant investment to renovate the Museum since we currently have no elevator to service the three floors. Therefore we engaged an architectural firm, along with an engineering firm to create a plan, with appoximate costs, for the renovation. Knowing that it would be necessary to raise several million dollars to accomplish this, we also engaged a firm to test the possibility of raising these monies through a capital campaign. We will launch the captital campaign in the next fiscal year.