Like so many other small towns, Titusville's citizens since the city's founding in 1867 have banded together to protect their homes and businesses from fires. They held socials and collected subscriptions to support basic fire protection for their town. They urged their neighbors to install lightning rods on their homes and clear their lots of overgrowth to prevent fires from starting or spreading. When Titusville was in the financial crisis in 1888, the citizens of the volunteer fire department donated their fire protection fund to the town fathers to keep Titusville from financial ruin. Titusville's monetary difficulties were of short duration and the town continued its rapid growth. So rapidly in fact that in the spring of 1890, the East Coast Advocate published a letter from Insurance Agent Silas Wright of Deland explaining he was unable to find insurance coverage for their building due to Titusville's rapid growth and the number of wooden buildings liable to go up in flames by the spread of a single fire.