Stratford Area Fire Department

08/27/2026

If you are attending the Edgar Steam Show and still haven't purchased your Stratford Area Fire Department raffle ticket, stop by our booth just east of the Main Gate. One raffle ticket gets you 31 chances to win. Every day in October we pick a winner. Also, we have fire safety coloring books and fire helmets for the youngsters. Hope to see you at the show.

08/19/2026

08/14/2026

SAFD will be selling our raffle tickets at the Neillsville Gun Show today till 6 pm and tomorrow from 8 am till 2 pm. Hope to see you there!

08/11/2026

☀️🎶 ONE LAST NIGHT IN THE PARK! 🎶☀️

We can’t believe our summer In The Park series is already coming to an end!

Join us THIS WEDNESDAY, August 12th from 6:00–8:00 PM for our final concert of the summer featuring the Hayes Boys Orchestra! This Polka group is just pure fun and sets a happy mood everywhere they play!🎺🎶

The support from our community this summer has been incredible, and we’d LOVE to finish the season with a great crowd!

🌭 Come hungry — we’ll have giant hot dogs, chips & ice cream floats!
🎟️ Plus, support the Stratford Fire Department by purchasing their raffle tickets!

Grab your lawn chairs, bring your family and friends, and let’s pack the park for one more great summer night together! ☀️🎶❤️

08/10/2026

We were honored to be able to give Marshall a ride to school in a fire truck earlier this year. Please try to make it out to this incredible fundraiser for him!

Eric, Heidi and Marshall Gotter received heartbreaking news that no parent should ever have to hear, but unfortunately too many do, their now 11 year-old son, Marshall, has been diagnosed with Ewing Sarcoma, a rare and aggressive form of bone cancer.

Marshall is a 11-year-old who attends Stratford Schools. He is known for his kind heart. He loves helping his neighbors with chores, spending time with his Nana, going to church, playing baseball, being in karate, and being with his cousins. Despite his challenges, he remains a sweet, caring boy who brings a lot of joy to those around him.

Doctors have found tumors in his femur, with additional spots in his lymph nodes, Marshall will need intensive and aggressive treatment from chemotherapy, surgeries, hospital stays, and ongoing medical care. The road ahead will be challenging, both physically and emotionally.

Because Marshfield Clinic does not have the specialized doctors needed to treat Ewing Sarcoma, Marshall and his family will need to travel to Madison weekly for treatment throughout this process. This means frequent long trips, time away from home, and additional costs for transportation, lodging, and time off work while they focus on Marshall’s care.

This summer, Marshall underwent a rotationplasty, a complex and life-changing surgery. As a result, he will temporarily lose his ability to walk and have a long and difficult road to recovery and rehabilitation. His family will have to make significant changes to their home to make it accessible to Marshall, along with new accommodations to allow him to navigate daily life.

This fundraiser will help support Marshall and his family with:
• Medical expenses, treatments, and ongoing care
• Travel to and from hospitals and specialists in Madison
• Lodging during extended treatment periods
• Meals and daily living expenses during this time
• Home modifications to make their space accessible for Marshall’s recovery
• Rehabilitation, mobility equipment, and adaptive needs after surgery
• Time off work so his family can be by his side every step of the way
• Anything Marshall needs to stay comfortable, supported, and strong throughout this fight

Here is a link to sign up if you are able to volunteer in anyway for this event. https://www.signupgenius.com/go/10C0D44A5A92CA0F8CE9-64743744-fundraiser Also if you would like to donate an item for a raffle, monetary donation or sponsor one of the activities happening that day please let me know. Thank you in advance!!

08/03/2026

We have our annual gun raffle tickets available. Please contact a FD member or message this page to get your tickets.

07/29/2026

Burn barrels used to sit in nearly every rural Wisconsin backyard, a rusted 55-gallon drum out past the garage that quietly handled a household's entire trash problem before curbside pickup reached most of the state's smaller towns. Before regular garbage service became standard, especially in farm country and small townships, tossing the week's trash into a barrel and lighting it up wasn't a workaround, it was just how a household dealt with waste.

The practice ran on genuinely simple logic. No landfill nearby, no weekly pickup truck coming down a gravel road, and a family generating trash regardless. A burn barrel solved the problem on the spot, no trip to town required, paper, cardboard, and household scraps reduced to ash in an afternoon. Kids growing up on Wisconsin farms in the 60s and 70s remember it as a genuine household chore, taking out the trash meant walking it to the barrel, not to a curb.

What ended the tradition wasn't convenience, it was health data. Studies eventually found that burning household trash in barrels released genuinely toxic emissions, arsenic, benzene, dioxin, formaldehyde, chemicals that don't show up from burning clean wood or leaves but pour out the moment plastic, treated wood, or synthetic materials hit the flames. Wisconsin's DNR found that just 15 households burning trash daily could produce the same cancer-causing dioxin and furan emissions as a 200-ton-per-day municipal incinerator running with modern pollution controls, and debris burning became the state's leading cause of wildfires, responsible for roughly 40 percent of them in an average year.

Wisconsin law eventually caught up with what the science showed, prohibiting the burning of garbage, plastics, and recyclables outright, while still allowing households to burn genuinely clean materials, dry leaves, untreated wood, plant clippings, on their own property. The rusted barrel itself never fully vanished from every rural backyard. Plenty are still sitting out there decades later, repurposed for legal brush burning or just left as a quiet leftover from a time when a Wisconsin household's entire trash removal system was a metal drum, a match, and whatever the wind happened to be doing that afternoon.

07/28/2026

Captain Steve Robers from our Fenwood Station representing well with his Fenwood Fire Department shirt on a visit to Mt. Rushmore!

07/24/2026

Update: (7/23/26)--The National Weather Service has confirmed 3 tornadoes impacted central Wisconsin on Monday, July 20th.

Details: https://www.wsaw.com/2026/07/24/three-tornadoes-confirmed-with-severe-storms-july-20/