MINOT —It’s a good time to step aside, said Stephen French, the town’s fire chief for 25 years.

“I feel good about where the department is right now,” he said in a recent interview.

French announced to selectmen in October that he would be stepping down as chief at the end of his term in February 2011.

First elected chief in March 1985, he joined the West Minot Fire Company as a fledgling firefighter on March 8, 1977.

“In those days, we were meeting in the one-bay station over in West Minot, no water and no plumbing,” he recalled. “We squeezed two trucks in there — the 1928 Dodge and the old International from the mid-’50s.”

The department also had a homemade tank truck, 1,200-gallon capacity, housed better than halfway across town at John Hemond’s farm.

It was a small, tightly knit group and as for training, “you learned as you went along.”

“Then it was pretty much, if you had the boots you were a firefighter.” he said.

And, French pointed out, boots that approached regulation were a precious commodity in his early days.

“Four pair of rubber boots hung on the truck, and if you were the first to get there, you got the boots,” he said.

In 1977 there was no truly organized dispatch. Often the initial alert was a phone call from a fire station in Auburn or Mechanic Falls to the Simpson household in Minot Corner.

“Fred Simpson’s wife would call you on the telephone, individually. Just call and hoped she’d get you,” French said. “Our biggest trouble in 1977 was communication.”

French is proud of the progress the department has made over the past 33 years — nearly 26 of which he was chief.

Central Station, adjacent to the Town Office, was built in 1979. Its two bays can house four vehicles, two wide and two deep, long enough for a tractor-trailer rig.

Engine 8, a 1996 Harvester International with a roof gun that can pump 1,250 gallons per minute, and Tank 3, a 2001 International, plus the town’s first responders’ rescue vehicle, a castoff from United Ambulance, and a Cascade trailer, are all housed at Central Station.

Orchard Station, opened in 2001 on Death Valley Road, a little off Brighton Hill Road, is also two bays wide and ensures that everyone in town lives within five miles of a fire station.

Engine 4, a 2006 tanker-pumper with a roof gun that can pump 1,250 gallons per minute, and a forestry pickup, acquired in 2001 through a federal grant, are housed at Orchard Station.

“The first brand-new firetruck the town ever owned, the 1982, is still kept in West Minot,” French said. “We sure have come a long way since then.”

Dispatch has taken great leaps. First, with Debbie Hemond, who ran it from her house on Pottle Hill, ending with the Ice Storm of ’98. Then Maine State Police took over for a time and now the Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Department handles it.

French said the 911 emergency dispatch system “was the right thing to do. Today, we get great service”

The department took a major step in 1997 when Allen Theriault convinced town meeting voters to support rescue services, French said.

“Combining fire and rescue in 1999, when the West Minot Fire Company became the Minot Fire Department, was a great accomplishment for the town,” he said. “Now about half our volunteers are firefighters and EMTs.”

Volunteer fire service is a diverse group, he said.

“We have them from all over: carpenters, electricians, military people, truck drivers, bus drivers, an engineer on a ship,” he said.

French himself is in the water business — “a natural for a firefighter” — as superintendent of the Mechanic Falls Water Co.

Credit for helping him guide the Minot Fire Department these near 26 years, goes, French said, to the fire and rescue volunteers and their families who pitched in as well; his wife, Brenda, and daughter, Laurie, who were very active in the auxiliary; his son, Jamie, who became an EMT and a Firefighter II and served professionally with the Auburn Fire Department; and his mother, Phyllis, who for many years was Debbie Hemond’s backup dispatcher.

“It’s been a group effort,” French said. “I’ll still be around the fire station, just not as much. It’s someone else’s turn to be chief.”