Austin Fire Drill Tower

About this property

Buford Tower (formerly the Austin Fire Drill Tower) is a tower standing along the north shore of Lady Bird Lake in downtown Austin, Texas. The structure was originally built in 1930 as a drill tower for the Austin Fire Department, but it now serves as a bell tower and landmark. Named after fire department Captain James L. Buford, the structure has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 2016. Austin first established a professional fire department in 1916, creating a need for a drill tower where the firefighters could train. On December 26, 1929, City Council authorized construction of a fire drill tower on a parcel of land along the Colorado River downtown, where the river could provide water for testing fire hoses and extinguishing training fires. The tower was built in 1930 at a cost of $6,200 (equivalent to $119,000 in 2025), and it immediately began to be burned and flooded regularly during training exercises and the testing of equipment. It also served as a backdrop for fire department photographs, social events, and public firefighting demonstrations. As decades passed, firefighting technology advanced, and Austin's buildings grew taller. In the 1960s, snorkel trucks gave the city's firefighters access to higher windows than could be reached with traditional ladders, and the tower's value as a training facility declined. At the same time, the growth of the city meant that the drill tower, originally built near the southern edge of town, was now crowded by tall modern buildings and heavy traffic, making the training fires a growing hazard to downtown. Finally, in 1974 the fire department opened a new training tower in southeast Austin, and the original Fire Drill Tower was closed. The tower stood unused and untended for years, and its unglazed windows allowed it to become infested with pigeons; eventually the city marked the structure for demolition. In 1978, however, Effie Kitchens (the widow of the tower's original builder) led a public campaign, together with the Austin chapter of the National Association of Women in Construction, to raise funds for the tower's restoration. The campaign raised $45,000, of which Kitchens personally contributed $30,000. These funds allowed the tower's brick facade to be cleaned, its roof repaired, and its windows glazed to keep wildlife out. Decorative iron grillwork was added to the doors at ground level and to the highest level, where an electronic carillon bell system was installed, transforming the fire drill tower into a working bell tower. After the renovations were completed, on August 23, 1978 the tower was rededicated as Buford Tower, named after Austin Fire Department Captain James L. Buford, the first Austin firefighter to die in the line of duty. The bell system was named the Kitchens Memorial Chimes, after the tower's builder, Rex D. Kitchens.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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