Useful & Beautiful / Timeline

The Fairmount Water Works in Philadelphia, America’s first municipal water works, grew from the city’s late-eighteenth-century search for clean water after yellow fever epidemics killed thousands. After the Centre Square Water Works opened in 1801, Frederick Graff and John Davis proposed and built a new pumping station on the Schuylkill River at Faire Mount between 1811 and 1815, beginning with the Engine House. Steam power soon gave way to water power, and between 1818 and 1822 the Old Mill House and a dam were built to drive waterwheels, while reservoirs atop Faire Mount distributed water by gravity throughout the city. The site also became a celebrated public landscape, with the Esplanade completed in 1835, the South Garden laid out from plans by Frederick Graff, fountains, pavilions, cliffside paths, and sculptures including Schuylkill Chained and Schuylkill Freed. As demand and technology changed, the works expanded with the Standpipe, the New Mill House with Jonval turbines, rebuilt mill houses, and the Great Pavilion, while the Watering Committee oversaw the system and Fairmount Park was created in part to protect the water supply from pollution. Pollution upstream and the inability to add filtration technology ended the water works’ service in 1909. From 1911 to 1962 the complex housed the first aquarium in the U.S., with fish exhibits in the mill houses and sea lions and seals in the Forebay. Construction of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the 1920s removed the reservoirs and filled in the Forebay, and after decades of decline, major restoration between 1982 and 2008 preserved the landmark as one of Philadelphia’s signature sites.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania · United States