https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/fairmount-water-works/
The buildings on the right were the waterworks for which this 1821 dam was built. The dam provided waterpower to replace the steam pumps that pumped the water up into a reservoir. It was built on an angle to help break up the ice flows in the winter. Behind the trees on the left is a fish ladder. When built, that area had a canal and lock to allow steamboats to bypass the dam.
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| Old Images of Philadelphia posted Reconstruction of the Fairmount Dam on the Schuylkill River after the break in 1904. Boathouse Row is in the background. Photo Credit: phillyh2o.org. [I found a different exposure in phillyh2o-course5.] Posted by Carl Manley. |
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| FairmountWaterWorks-history [Not only does this show the canal and lock, it shows it was built in a rural area. Back then, the town was still along the Delaware River.] The FWW opened its doors in 1815 as the sole water pumping station for Philadelphia using steam power. It was decommissioned in 1909 after Philly moved to sand filtration for water purification. The building was used for a variety of uses. As of Oct 2003, its current use is "a permanent educational facility focused on urban water education." This page has a 16-min video about the need for clean water. In 1793, 20% of population died of yellow fever. (The video doesn't provide a time index.) I'm reminded that Philly was the largest city in America before the Erie Canal was built. It became the first city in the world to consider delivery of water to be a municipal responsibility. The steam pump could lift 2 million gallons per day up 90' to a reservoir. But the boilers exploded in 1818 and then again in 1821. So that is when they built the world's longest dam and converted to water power for the pumps. 30 gallons of water was needed to pump one gallon. The video has a nice animation of the pumping plant. The cost of pumping 1 million gallons went from $206 to $4. |
The Museum of Art was built on the land that had the 22 million gallon reservoir. [video] (The original reservoir was 2 million gallons and the head was 96'. [clio])
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| 1949 Philadelphia Quad @ 1:24,000 |
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| Image from Historic Marker Database via TheClio Marian, Sara. "Fairmount Dam and Water Works." Clio: Your Guide to History. June 5, 2016. Accessed June 23, 2022. https://theclio.com/entry/23261 The dam still holds the water supply for the city's Belmont and Queen Lane Pumping Stations. The FWW supplemented a water works that was built in 1801 where the City Hall now stands. "Power was originally supplied by Oliver Evans' high-pressure steam engine, the largest of its day." The eight water-powered pumps were installed individually from 1822 to 1843. Because high tides stopped the breast water wheels for a few hours twice a day, the horizontal wheels were replaced by vertical Jonval turbines in 1851. Additional buildings and turbines were added as the city grew and needed more water. |
The city bought a lot of land along the Schuylkill River in an effort to prevent its pollution by industry. Even with fines, pollution happened anyhow and the river turned black. In 1890, Philly suffered a terrible outbreak of cholera and typhoid. So the city built treatment plants and shutdown this pumping of raw water. But the purchase of 3,000 acres of riverbanks "became the birthplace of what would become the largest landscaped urban park in North America." [PhiladelphiaEncyclopedia]
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| phillyh2o-course6 "In 1860, when the Philadelphia Board of Health began tracking causes of death, typhoid fever was among the city's leading killers. Cholera is often wrongly cited as the most deadly of various waterborne diseases, but its epidemics were episodic, while typhoid was consistently deadly. Between 1860 and 1890, cholera killed roughly 1,000 Philadelphians (most of these in a single epidemic in 1866). In the same period, typhoid fever killed more than 16,000. For each person who died from typhoid, roughly ten to fifteen more became ill but did not die, meaning that the disease ultimately afflicted hundreds of thousands of people." In the late 1800s there were three schools of thought concerning a pure water supply: 1) build aqueducts from clean watersheds upstream, 2) slow sand filtration plants and 3) bacteria is a hoax (that is, denial). "In 1900 Councils finally acted, appropriating funds to build five filtration plants and construct the water mains necessary to deliver filtered water from both rivers to all parts of the City....A new pumping station was also constructed at Lardner's Point (at that time the largest such pumping station in the world) to take water from the new Torresdale filters (then the largest single filter plant in the world ) and distribute it to reservoirs throughout the city." Because of its extensive investment in water treatment, Philly didn't bother to finish building interceptor sewers and water reclamation (sewage treatment) plants until the 1950s. And those removed only about half of the pollutants. In the 1970s and 80s upgrades were made that removed up to 95% of the pollutants. |
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| phillyh2o-course6 (Chart created by Adam Levine from various official sources.) Note that the water supply was chlorinated by 1914. |
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| Photo via HistoricalMarker, cropped Photographed By Eric Milask, August 4, 2013 "At 2,008 feet, this innovative dam was the longest in the United States when completed in 1821." |
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| Photo via reddit "Fairmont Dam, Schuylkill River, Philadelphia, PA - Left is normal conditions, right is current due to flooding from Hurricane Ida. The river has risen to a record high of 17.2 feet above normal." |
"The restoration of the Fairmount Dam fishway is important because of the furthest downstream passage of this passageway flows most directly into the ocean, allowing any fish that travel upstream to spawn a direct passage to their spawning areas. American shad, the main target of the fishway, are a fish that spawn genetically, meaning that a population of shad will spawn at the same area for numerous generations. Eliminating any impediments to the Schuylkill drainage will benefit the population growth of American shad and any other fish that inhabit the Schuylkill." [FairmountWaterWorks-fish]
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| Old Images of Philadelphia posted Title: Waterworks and Philadelphia Museum of Art Creation Date: 4/9/1940 Historic Street Address: Fairmount Dam, Schuylkill River Media Type: Photographic Prints Source: Print and Picture Collection Notes: This caption for the photograph is from the Public Ledger, April 9, 1940: "Swollen by yesterday's heavy rainstorm, the turbulent Schuylkill gushed over Fairmount Dam, below Boathouse Row, dangerously near flood stage this morning. The high water threatens the lower levels of the Aquarium, pictured in the right background. The Art Museum is directly behind it." Image source: The Free Library of Philadelphia |
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