David N. Hilton grew up in York with deep family ties to Cape Neddick, Moody, and the Ogunquit Fire Department, and from an early age developed a fascination with firefighting and forest fire lookout towers. At age 12, Agamenticus tower watchman John Chamblee picked him up at the Cape Neddick Post Office on the way to work, giving him his first experience in the tower and sparking a lasting love of spotting forest fires. After briefly joining the York Beach Fire Department in 1978 and graduating from York High School in 1979, he joined the York Village Fire Department, where he served as a firefighter, driver/operator, and lieutenant and became known for driving Engine 4, a 2001 Pierce Enforcer. In 1991, when Maine decided to close the towers to save money, York County fire chiefs and York Chief Chris Balentine organized a volunteer effort to keep them staffed, and Hilton became central to that work. He strongly believed the towers were needed and spent many hours manning Mount Agamenticus, while volunteers also staffed Mount Hope and Ossipee Mountain towers. Known for spotting even the lightest column of smoke and pinpointing fires within feet, he recruited and trained volunteers, arranged permission from area fire departments to use their fire frequencies, gathered 39 AM radios to keep towers in Maine and New Hampshire in contact, and even installed a computer in the tower to improve locating fires. He also wrote a successful book about Maine fire towers and was remembered as a son, husband, father, firefighter, tower watchman, and friend to the fire service and forest fire service. Mount Agamenticus, a triple mountain about 692 feet high, had long served as a landmark for mariners and early sailors. A steel fire tower was erected there in the fall of 1918, connected to the New England Telephone and Telegraph system, and operated from May to early October under a cost-sharing agreement between the United States Forest Service and the state; that year the tower reported 34 fires. The first tower was dismantled in 1934 and re-erected on Bear Mountain in Hartford, Maine, while Norris Trafton of York supplied men, horses, and wagons to haul materials up Mount Agamenticus for a new tower. Before World War II only a footpath led to the summit, and the granite steps at the base of the present tower are the same ones used at the 1918 tower. The present tower was moved in the early 1940s when the U.S. Army occupied the mountaintop as a radar base. The first wedding on Mount Agamenticus took place in the lookout tower on August 29, 1937, and in September 1941 fire observer Robert P. Ramsdell was the first to spot a disastrous fire in a Berwick slash lot, prompting firefighters from more than 18 communities, a Civilian Conservation Corps detachment, forest rangers, a Boston and Maine Railroad crew, and more than 500 men to battle the blaze for several days. In the early 1980s, crews of the Maine Forest Service built a new cab for the tower and lifted it into place by helicopter, and volunteers have continued to maintain the structure. Maine Forestry Service personnel staffed the tower from 1918 until state funding ended in 1991, and volunteers from York County, Maine, and southern New Hampshire have served as lookouts from 1993 onward.