Fire repeatedly devastated nineteenth-century downtowns across America, where water often had to be brought from nearby rivers and firefighting with hand-held buckets and hand pumps was frequently ineffective. In 1868, Vergennes took its first steps toward a city waterworks for fire protection by installing three turbine-powered water pumps at the base of Otter Creek Falls, but they proved unreliable. The city then contracted with John P. Flanders, owner of the Vergennes Machine Company, to build a better pump. Flanders designed, cast, machined, and patented the parts of a unique double-acting piston pump. In 1874, the city built a 30 square-foot Italianate pump house on an island at the top of the falls to contain the new pump and turbine, using three-foot-thick walls of limestone quarried in Essex, New York. Water from Otter Creek was diverted through a large water turbine in the lower level to power the pump's gears, cranks, and pistons, and creek water was also piped to a cistern there so sediment could settle before the water was pumped to factories and other city users. The pump remained in service until the 1930s, when the city developed a new water system through a Depression Era Works Project Administration project.