Key Largo Volunteer Fire Museum

The Key Largo Volunteer Fire Rescue Museum opened on July 4, 2025 at 3 East Drive, at mile marker 99 oceanside by the blinking light, next door to Station 24. The building is the original home of the Key Largo Volunteer Fire Rescue Department, which makes it the rare local museum housed in the thing it is about. Frank Conklin, a former volunteer firefighter and now a commissioner with the Key Largo Fire and EMS District, built the collection by going back to the men and women who served and asking what they still had in their garages.

The story it tells runs from 1955, when Key Largo’s volunteers began answering calls, to a department that is fully paid today. Its reach is wider than one station, though. The museum honors firefighters from all 26 fire stations in Monroe County, from Ocean Reef down to Key West.

The centerpiece is a tribute to Harry Davis Jr., Key Largo’s first Black fire chief, assembled from award plaques his family donated. Davis was born in 1944 on his father’s pistol range, on land that is now Port Largo. He started out sweeping the firehouse the year it was built in 1955 and worked his way up to chief, serving from 1971 to 1975 with 29 volunteers under him. Segregation kept him out of Coral Shores High School, so he rode a Greyhound bus to Homestead for his schooling, and he was among the crews who fought the Coral Shores fire through the night in 1968. As a boy he cleared land that became Hibiscus Park and John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park. He died in 1989 at 45.

Around that sit the tools of the job. The Water Emergency Team’s first watercraft and a fireboat the department ran in the 1980s. Original bunker gear. A Hurst hydraulic extrication tool, the Jaws of Life, which carries its own piece of local history: Hurst used this department as a training center because the call volume on the 18-mile stretch of U.S. 1 was so punishing that crews here got the newest equipment first. Former chief Ron Mobley, who joined the volunteers out of high school in 1974 and later spent two weeks at ground zero with Florida Task Force 1, built the rope rescue exhibit.

The museum now holds an annual September 11 remembrance ceremony, with a bell rung by a Key Largo firefighter.

Hours are limited. The museum opens on Wednesdays, late morning through early afternoon and again in the evening. Admission is free and donations go back into the collection.