If you’ve traveled in rural America, you may have encountered a fire tower. Sometimes, when we don’t need them to fight fires any more, we use them as tourist attractions or to observe wildlife. The Former Fire Lookout Sites Register keeps track of them and maintains disused towers, often fighting to preserve them. If you’re traveling in the US, you can use your site to find them.

And we don’t need them as much as we used to. But, for a long time, lookout towers were the only weapon we had to spot fires quickly, especially forest and wilderness fires that threaten valuable forests and timber.

But fire towers have long existed in cities too.