By Jane Prendergast
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Al Rahn with Spring Grove Cemetery cleans the gravestones of firefighters buried in a special firefighters plot at Spring Grove Cemetery Tuesday. (Craig Ruttle photo) | ZOOM |

A plot among fellow firefighters is reserved for Oscar Armstrong III.

It's along the eastern edge of Spring Grove Cemetery, in one of the oldest sections, under a huge oak that doesn't have its leaves yet.

Since 1866, this place at the bend of the pavement in Section 39 has been set aside for people who fought fires for a living in the Queen City. Twenty-eightmen are buried here. Thursday afternoon, there will be 29.

"Ozzie"Armstrong died Friday morning in a fire on Laidlaw Avenue in Bond Hill. He was manning a hose line inside when the fire got so hot it flashed over, engulfing the entire room plus everything and everyone in it.

Armstrong will be brought to this spot by a horse-drawn caisson escorted by as many as 100 bagpipers - the most Spring Grove has ever seen at once. He'll be buried next to firefighter Joseph Will, who was laid to rest here in 1925.

Frank Determan is here too. He died in a fire at Buttermiller's Stable on Court Street in July, 1866.

So is Edward Parker, one of five firefighters killed in a fire at Eighth St. and Eggleston Ave. Dec. 11, 1890. So is William Andress, who fell off a roof on Parson Street in 1878, contracted tetanus and died.

Burial here is free, with permission from the Fireman's Protective Association. But the site doesn't get used much anymore because most firefighters prefer to be laid to rest near family. Before Armstrong, the last to be buried here was Robert Lee Kennedy, a Navy veteran of World War II who died in 1985.

Caretakers, their boots sinking a little in the soft, muddy ground, cleaned up Section 39 on Tuesday. They mulched the leaves still scattered from last fall and trimmed the grass, even though it's not yet all green or growing much.

Before sundown Thursday, it will hold the body and casket of the first Cincinnati firefighter killed in the line of duty in more than two decades.

He'll lay under the huge oak and next to the gray stone monument that dedicates his space to those "whose courage and devotion to the public service are recorded also in the hearts of their grateful fellow citizens."

E-mail jprendergast@enquirer.com