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In the fall of 2003, after being decommissioned as a waterworks nearly a century ago, Philadelphians, searching for an ecotourism attraction, reopened its doors as the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center.
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Current photograph shows the Falls of the Schuylkill below the Falls Bridge and underwater. After Josiah White sold the waterpower rights to the Philadelphia Water Commission, a dam was constructed at Fairmont that turned the six-miles above the dam into a lake.
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Signs in the Fairmont Waterworks Interpretive Center describe the evolution of the waterworks. It was originally constructed on the erroneous belief that the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 was caused by polluted water.
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The Fairmont Waterworks was decommissioned in 1909. The waterworks operated as the Fairmont Aquarium from 1911 until 1962. It was converted into a swimming pool. Damaged by a hurricane, the pool was closed in 1973.
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Tour guide, Ray Finkel, tells members of the Lehigh Valley and Philadelphia Canoe Clubs about the history of Fairmont Waterworks. The Fairmont Dam was built to channel the river through the waterworks to provide power for pumping to the reservoirs. This construction followed a plan developed by Josiah White, although, Finkel had never heard of White.
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Continued from Part 1 – A Brilliant Solution
Part 2 – The Golden Age
In 1828, White wrote, “The Watering Committee called on me in 1810 and 1811 at the Falls of the Schuylkill to inquire about the sale of waterpower, with a view to raising water by waterpower and sufficiently high to supply a reservoir … at Fair Mount…I offered them my estate at the Falls at cost. They declined and erected the steam engine.”
White found he needed partners to raise the necessary funds and to assist him in his plans, he partnered with Erskine Hazard, a machinist and son of Ebenezer Hazard – the first Postmaster of the United States, in the wire mill operation. In 1815, the mill burnt down and he took on Joseph Gillingham as a partner to help develop the navigation system.
As required, White built a stone-filled cribbing dam, the first across a major river, and a lock for the passage of shipping.
During the War of 1812, while bituminous coal was not being delivered to Philadelphia, anthracite coal was beginning to arrive from the Lehigh coalfields. The Watering Commission experimented with the hard coal and could not get it to burn. White discovered how to burn the anthracite and found that it was cleaner burning, had less ash and produced four times as much heat per bushel.
White saw the possibilities of the Lehigh coal business and again approached the Watering Commission with his plans to use the Schuylkill waterpower to pump water to the homes in Philadelphia.
In 1816, White and Gillingham “proposed to deliver to the reservoir at Fair Mont an amount of water daily not to exceed two million gallons.”
In 1918, White wrote an article in a Philadelphia area newspaper explaining the high cost of using steam engines to pump water and again recommended using the power of the Schuylkill to provide the pumping power. White wrote, “I tried to get the City to buy it to get a water power for raising their water in the place of steam power, without avail.”
On April 8, 1919, the City of Philadelphia passed an act to purchase the Falls and its waterpower rights from White and Gillingham for a sum not to exceed one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Golden Age of Fairmont
According to the Fairmont Waterworks Interpretive video, needing a safer, larger and more reliable system, “The Water Committee, in truly visionary thinking, solved the problem by returning to the most efficient source of power, the Schuylkill itself. With the construction in 1821 of Fairmont Dam, the Golden age of the Fairmont Waterworks began.”
Using White’s concept, a dam was built at Fairmont and the river was channeled to a bank of water wheels. The technology was reliable and inexpensive to operate. Fairmont Waterworks became extremely profitable. It operated just as White had stated. Profits were used to develop a Greek-revival architecture around the waterworks and to procure land adjacent to the river. This became Fairmont Park. Fairmont Park became the pride of Philadelphia.
Tarnished Gold
Although Philadelphia had secured the land adjacent to the Schuylkill as park land, thereby protecting its water source, upstream things were not so pristine. By the 1880s, the growth of mining, tanning and settlements turned the Schuylkill into a an open sewer. The Schuylkill water was seen as the source of typhoid and cholera epidemics.
In 1976, the Fairmont Waterworks was declared a National Historic Landmark because it was the first source of municipal water. It opened as the Fairmont Waterworks Interpretive Center in the fall of 2003.
Postscript
The following is an excerpt “The Early History of the Falls of Schuylkill” by Charles Hager, a neighbor of Josiah White at the Falls of the Schuylkill.
He further notes, “Have I not shown good reasons for saying that I knew of no man to whom the citizens of Philadelphia are so much indebted for substantial benefits they have long enjoyed as they are to Josiah White?”
Yet, why at the Fairmont Waterworks Interpretive Center does everyone respond, “Josiah White? Never Heard of him.”
Perhaps it is not surprising. Mauch Chunk, the town that White founded and the town that became the base of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company, the first significant railroad, the Lehigh Navigation system and the source of anthracite coal the fueled the American Industrial Revolution, hardly remembers White.
Instead of honoring the founder and builder of the town, in 1953, Mauch Chunk changed it name to Jim Thorpe to memorialize a person that had nothing to do with the town—had never visited the town.
Go figure.
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