When a pressurized system came to Springfield in 1881 — as to other places before and after that — “water quality was an afterthought,” said Springfielder Alvin D. Wansing, co-author of “History of Ohio’s Water Systems.”
It was the ability of the systems to spray water to the top of the town’s highest buildings in the event of fire that was the ultimate measuring stick.
To that end, Wansing and co-author J. Douglas Brookhart point out what happened at the corner of Third and Main streets in Dayton on Aug. 28, 1869, when two of Birdsill Holly’s elliptical rotary pumps demonstrated their power for the first time in what then were considered Western states.
“The test consisted in the throwing of two streams of water through two sets of hose 1,000 feet long over a wire stretched 100 feet high across Main Street,” the authors report. “The test was successful and the Holly pumps were placed into service.”
A German art
Wansing said it “took about 18 months” for Brookhart and him to pull together the historic postcards and other items in the book designed by Daniel E. Uhlenhake and financed by the Ohio Section American Water Works Association.
Actually collecting the material required decades.
Wansing came to Springfield on Dec. 1, 1969, as a consulting engineer from Black & Veatch.
After three years of consulting work, the city hired him, and Wansing spent more than 25 years as director of the city’s water and wastewater operations.
A hobby of collecting historic Springfield postcards gave way to collecting waterworks cards from around Ohio, a hobby worth pursuing, the authors helpfully explain, because of the fine German printing that dominated the postcard market from the late 19th century until World War I.
Coupled with the handsome architecture of the 19th and early 20th century structures they illustrate, the cards lend the volume the feel of a what a coffee table book would have been like in the era before photography.
In its final draft, the book also offers sips from the fountain of historic knowledge.
In the beginning
“Initially, you got water out of the nearest stream,” Wansing said. “And this is how you located your town, where you could get water. But as the towns grew, it became very difficult to supply water individually.”
Not surprisingly, Cincinnati was the first Ohio city to set up a pressurized system, which went into service July 3, 1821.
Report the authors: “The pumps were operated by horses or oxen working a circular tread mill. Piping consisted of logs 10 inches in diameter, 12 feet in length with a 2½-inch hole bored through them.”
As steam power flexed its muscles, Birdsill Holly, whose biography appears in the book, developed steam powered pumps and marketed his ready-to-operate, turn-key models to municipalities.
Urbana bought a Holly system that went on line in 1878.
Until Springfield got its own system three years later, Wansing said, Springfielders got their water either from cisterns that collected rain water or the community’s trough on Columbia Street.
Steubenville had a similar trough, augmented by teamsters who would deliver either spring or river water around town in barrels.
Historical footnote
Wansing said sump pumps in the basement of the Clark State Community College Performing Arts Center are historical footnotes for Springfield’s public trough. In building the center, workers uncovered the stream, which continues to flow today.
In the 1980s, city crews working on a street project ran into another artifact from the days before pressurized water: bricks from a fire cistern the city had installed near Columbia and Main streets.
Those cisterns were the way the city tried to ensure adequate water for firefighting before the pressurized system came on line.
When public pressure would build for a water system, councilmen would sometimes turn down the system as too expensive, then add cisterns to allay citizen fears.
The location of the city’s system of cisterns appears in the 1882 county atlas.
By its publication, however, Springfield had put its first pumping system in operation just north of Buck Creek in the area near the current Springfield Municipal Stadium.
“They were water pump stations. There was no treatment,” Wansing said. “The only treatment that Springfield water got was some settling.”
And in the age of steam, the real measure for the effectiveness of a system was measured on what might be called the “coal, hard facts.”
Said Wansing, “One of the ways you judged your pumping system was how many million gallons of water you could pump per ton of coal used.”
A social affair
The city’s second plant opened in what is now Old Reid Park in 1896, which is why the road leading to the park from Columbus Avenue is called Pumphouse Road.
There, water taken from Buck Creek went into settling ponds, which could be taken off line on a schedule so the accumulated sludge could be shoveled out.
The water fed into a large pumping station, that on the evening of Sept. 28, 1898, was converted in a dining room for members of the Central States Water Works Association, who were in Springfield for their first convention.
“The tables were profusely decorated, and accommodated a menu which was composed of a delightful combination of both the substantials and delicacies, served in a manner wholly appropriate to the occasion,” reported Springfield’s morning newspaper, The Sun.
The paper also noted the group had been shown the Warder, Bushnell and Glessner works on the grounds of what later would be International Harvester Company.
The Central States group joined with the America Water Works Association in 1915, something Wansing was able to document for the book project after years of suspecting that was the case.
He long since has had the fancy medal and ribbon given to each of the members in attendance at the 1898 affair.
Cleaning up act
After a typhoid outbreak in Cleveland in 1903 and a second in Salem that killed 27 and sickened 800 in 1920, water systems began treating water before pumping it.
Chlorination was usually done by infusing water with chlorine gas suspended in a bell jar. Before that, what treatment had been done had the purpose of softening water for household use.
The progressive village of Oberlin started using a lime-soda treatment process on 1903, five years before it was put on line in Columbus.
The lime-soda softening method was further developed by Columbus chemist and waterworks employee Charles P. Hoover, who, with his brother, Clarence B., were honored when the city named its north side dam for the two of them.
Stream of history
Wansing and Brookhart touch on other wonders of Ohio waterworks history:
• The 15-inch cast iron main through which all of the city of Canton’s water once flowed;
• The public pool the village of Eaton filled with condensed water from the steam boilers that ran its pumping station;
• The architectural remnants of the era of early water plants that still survived.
Filled with historical sidebars, images from water plants around the state and portraits of people prominent in the field, Wansing and Brookhart’s book is a reminder that even water that’s passed under the bridge is worth taking a look at once again.
As Dick Miller says in the introduction, “The provision of water of unquestionable quality did not occur overnight.”
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