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8book, Sketches of Louisville, Dr. Henry McMurtrie wrote:The well water of Louisville . . . which is theone commonly used by the inhabitants, is extremelybad, containing besides a considerable quantityof lime, a large portion of decomposed vegetablematter. . .The water of the wells after standing alittle time becomes nauseous to the taste, andacquires a smell highly disagreeable to delicatestomachs. . .This bad quality of water in general use isone great cause of a variety of comnlaints(particularly diarrhea) that are common in thesummer months, and calls loudly for a remedy,which may be found easily in a steam engineand the Ohio, whose waters being extremely pure,might with a little expense be distributedthroughout every part of the town, an arrangement which will probably take place at novery distant period.7Dr. McMurtrie may have been optimistic in his assessmentof the time it would take to provide Louisville withclean water, but in his description of the problem andits solution he was completely accurate.Louisvillehad ample ground water but the wells were shallow andeasily contaminated.So serious was the problem thatthe city acquired the reputation of being "the graveyard of the western country."10Yet at the timeMcMurtrie wrote, bad water was only one of many problemswith which the city- was burdened.Louisville began its life in the middle of theAmerican Revolution as a fort at the Falls of the Ohio.These "falls" were in reality a dangerous rapids whichat times of low water necessitated the only portage

9in the two thousand mile waterway from Western Pennsylvania to New Orleans on the Gulf of Mexico.The sitewas perfect for commercial development, but years ofIndian unrest, even after the war, and the difficultyof transporting goods to the Eastern markets against theriver's current, prevented rapid growth in the eighteenthcentury.Political stability that came with the end ofthe Indian wars, and the incorporation of the Louisianaterritory, and New Orleans, the western country's majorseaport, into the United States, brought the securitynecessary for Louisville to emerge from the wilderness.In 181 when it had a population of little over a thousand peopl the final ingredient for success arrivedwhen the first steamboat docked there awaiting highwater before navigating the falls. 11Steam poweredshipping turned Louisville into a boom town.In 1820the population was 4,012, and by 1850 Louisville wasthe tenth largest city in the United States with apopulation of 43,00o.12The problem with boom towns is one of keeping upwith their own growth.An imbalanced tax system andimmature banking institutions left such cities preyto rapidly fluctuating periods of economic boom and bust.Credit was hard to get and confidence was easily lost.Financial panics in the 1830's and 40's halted orinterrupted many projects among them the completion of

10a new County Court House.13Many far more importantprograms than a controversial water works had to becarried out first.In his book McMurtrie pointedout even greater problems than the poor quality well water.There was no hospital, the streets were filthy andunpaved, and ponds and wetlands around the city provided an even more visible source of disease than thewells.14Louisville opened its first hospital in 1823after serious epidemics struck the city in 1817 and 1822.At the same time the "Pond Fund" was begun.Money wasraised by benefit theater performances and a 60,000lottery to begin draining the land.It was not until1828, when Louisville had a population of 10,000 and anannual budget of 40,000, that a program of grading andpaving the streets began.16These basic improvements were successful in combatting the epidemics but more was needed to change thecity's image.Its citizens were ambitious, and activelypromoted its cultural and industrial growth.free public school east of the AlleghenysThe firstopened inLouisville in 1829 {months ahead of the arch rival,,, IC inc1nnat1 s). 17Ten years later the city had a newmedical school which was the cornerstone of the University of Louisville, chartered in 1846.18This is theoldest municipal university in the United States.first bank was chartered in 1833 and the LouisvilleThe

11Hotel and the Galt House were acclaimed by such international travellers as Charles Dickens to be the equalof any in Europe.19More importantly, Louisville was becoming a centerfor industry as well as commerce, with a reputation forquality rather than quantity of production.In 1857, theyear the water works was begun, the city had, among itsmany industries, twenty-one machinery and iron works,and factories for making agricultural implements,jewelry, books, organs and pianos, steamboats and manyother items working with everything from alcohol to.zinc.20The decision to build a municipal water works wasa product of this growth and ambition even more than itwas a response to need.It was to be constructedwherever possible with the products of local skills andmanufacturing, and in the excellence of its engineeringand its architecture the water works would promote theindustrial talents of the city and its culturalaccomplishments.It would also be avisible sign ofa healthy city with a progressive government and aconcerned population.This works was, however, not the first to bebuilt west of the Alleghenys.Several of the largercities in Ohio and Indiana, which were strong competitors in the race for industrial and commercial

12growth, had already established steam pumped waterworks at the time Louisville began.Such a trend mayhave been encouraged by the abundant supply of cleanriver water in the Ohio Basin, as well as the growingsophistication of steam technology, at any rate,Cleveland and Cincinnati, Ohio, and Madison, Indiana,were even earlier than Louisville to employ TheodoreR. Scowden as a water works engineer.Yet only inLouisville did Scowden extend his skill into the fieldof architecture with such outstanding results.Unlikethe others, this water works was designed to be seenand remembered.Such an ambitious program requiredpublic rather than private financing, and thereforethe backing of an enthusiastic city government.Though the Louisville Water Company was technicallya private company with a charter first issued in1853, the largest share of the financial responsibilityfor construction was met by municipal bonds, and thecity continued to subsidize the works as long asnecessary to keep the water rates down and enablethe service to expand as needed.This is a commonpattern for public utilities in this country, butsuch industrial projects no longer receive thearchitectural embellishment which in the nineteenthcentury reflected the city's pride and accomplishment.

13Louisville was among the first American cities topromote itself in this way, and its works are almostunique in their survival.

Chapter IIThough the Louisville Water Company was firstchartered in 1853 it was not until 1856 that the citypassed its first bond issue to raise money for construction.That year surveys were taken to determine thebest location for the pumping station and reservoir,and in 1857 construction began under the design andsupervision of Theodore R. Scowden.engineer.Scowden was anHis specific field of expertise was steamengines, but he designed everything at the LouisvilleWater Works from the intake pipe to the classicallantern on top of the Standpipe Tower.To understandthe breadth of Scowden's abilities one must look beyondhis education to the attitudes and circumstances thatinfluenced his life.Of these, the most importantwas the condition of the engineering sciencesin theearly and middle nineteenth century.Engineering as a field of professional studybarely existed in this country when Scowden was growingup.It began as an outgrowth of architecture, speci-fically Nee-Classical architecture, whose leaders,Benjamin Latrobe, Robert Mills, and even ThomasJefferson, were not slow to apply their creative genius

15to mechanical as well as architectural design.When thestate of Virginia was seeking to hire an engineer in1816 it consulted Benjamin Latrobe, then architectfor the Capital.He recommended his own former pupilswho had worked with him on the Philadelphia water works,and Robert Mills who had worked on the Chesapeake andDelaware Canal,(and who later advised the city ofWashington on its water works).Latrobe also recommendedhis son Henry who was then in New Orleans working onthat city's water works.There were at this time alsoa few men, notably the Frenchman, Maximilian Godefroy,whose training was entirely engineering, and such men werein demand for jobs like those in Virginia, canal androad construction.20These early engineers, if they werenot trained in Europe, got their education throughapprenticeship.Engineering curriculum was not offeredin American colleges and universities until 1864 and 65,yet in 1850 there were about 512 engineers listed incensus reports.21Scowden was born in 1815 in Pittsburgh, too earlyto have gone to a technical school.He attended AugustaCollege in Kentucky until he was seventeen and thenwas apprenticed to the steam engine business in Cincinnati for about four years.For the next eight yearsScowden was an engineer on a steam boat on the Cincinnati

16to New Orleans run, during which time he continued tostudy mechanics, hydrolics and civil engineering.Atlast in 1844 he left the river boats and began to design.22s t earn engines.Education through apprenticeship is as broad oras narrow as the apprentice chooses to make it.Thereis no record of where Scowden learned to design and buildbuildings, canals, or even whole water systems, but inhis life time he did all of those things very well atleast once.Two factors may have contributed to thebroadening of his skills.The first was the growingnumber of periodicals in the nineteenth century whichcovered developments in both architecture and engineering.Such magazines as the The Analytic Magazine of Philadelphia,The American Quarterly Review, and The Young Mechanicwrote frequently and thoroughly on the works of leading.'Americanarc h'itects an d engineers,23an d newspaperscovered the debates and developments of their day in theareas of public improvements such as canals and waterworks.Very little of this material has survived tothe present but from published reports of engineeringprojects by Robert Mills and others it is possible togain a picture of part of Scowden's background.The other factor which contributed to Scowden's.abilities was his many travels.He was thoroughly

17familiar with the Ohio and Mississippi river systemsand probably had opportunity to visit civil engineeringprojects along this route while he worked on the riverboats.He would have passed through the first of thecanals built at Louisville to bypass the Falls and seenfirsthand the early water works of cities from NewOrleans to Cincinnati and probably beyond.Then in1851 when Scowden was hired to design the improvementsto Cincinnati's water works that city sent him to Englandand France to observe European mechanical and civilengineering projects, principally their water works, public. .24d oc k s an d street pavingan d d raining.By the time he came to Louisville Scowden was demonstrably capable as an architect in the classic traditionof the day; as a civil engineer able to lay out canalsand water supply systems; and as a mechanical engineerable to design complicated steam pumping apparatus andpipe systems.Of all these things which he did inLouisville, only his architecture survives, but tobetter understand that architecture some picture of hisengineering must be formulated.The Louisville Water Works was designed around twoCornish beam type pumping engines which, with the aidof a stand pipe to equalize the pressure, pumped waterfrom the Ohio River to a reservoir of 10,000,000 gallon

18capacity, located on a nearbyhill.The site waschosen because of the cleanliness of the water.It isupstream from the city, and the almost seasonal inundations of the surrounding flood plain has kept developmentand subsequent pollution to a minimum.The river itselfis broad and deep there and runs over a gravel bed sothe water is freer of sediment as well.25The Reservoir was constructed on a bluff 90 feethigh overlooking the Pumping Station less than a mileaway, and the city a mile and a half down river.It wastotally destroyed in the twentieth century when aveteran's hospital was built on the same site but somedescriptions remain.The basin was a five hundred bythree hundred and two foot rectangle whose raised wallswere ninety feet wide at the base and twenty feet wideat the top.It was lined with brick on the inside andsodded on the outside with landscaping touches of ironfences, gravel walks and evergreen and shade treeplantings.In appearance it was probably similar to thereservoir Scowden designed for the Cleveland water worksin 1852 (see figurefour).This reservoir could notmeet the demands created by Louisville's rapid growthafter the Civil war so construction was begun on a newone in 1877 which was located two and a half miles from. the river, and was not visible from the Pumping Station.

19This problem of rapid obsolescence is the primaryreason for the loss of all or part of most early waterworks.In only one area did Scowden successfully anti-cipate the demands that would be placed on his waterworks and that was in the use of two well crafted cornishbeam engines for pumping.Ironicall these engines whichremained in full operation for thirty years and continuedas a back up system for another twenty year do notsurvive today even in drawings; yet their high qualityin design and performance is the factor most responsiblefor the survival of the architecture designed to housethem.Due to their long life the Pumping Station hadbecome emotionally, if not legally, a landmark, irreplaceable to the city of Louisville.The pumps were of the Cornish Beam design whichoriginated in Cornwall in the early eighteenth centuryfor the purposes of draining the mines.This type waschosen as most efficient for the London water works in1837 and later y1as used in Paris.the pump is fairly simple.The principal behindSteam is piped into acylinder sealed by a plunger which rises when the steamenters and falls when the steam cools and condenses.This plunger is attached to a horizontal walking beamwhich operates like a seesaw raising and lowering.another plunger!in the pump cylinder which causes a

20vacuum to suck water into the intake pipe, from which itcan be discharged to pipes leading to the reservoir.The engine's efficiency is dependent largely on itstight and durable construction and the proper coordination of its parts.The Louisville pumps were excellentlydesigned and built at the Union Iron Works in that city.They were the first Cornish pumps built west of theAlleghenysand were a fine example of the quality ofLouisville's manufacturing.It is known that the walking beams were thirtytwo feet long and seven feet wide in the middle.Thepump plunger was thirty-six inches in diameter and thesteam cylinder was seventy inches, and both had a ten footstroke.Thus the pumps themselves fully occupied thecentral chamber of the pumping station whose exteriordimensions were forty-six feet wide by fifty-one feetdeep and fifty-one feet high to the cornice.Thewalking beams pivoted on a twenty inch diameter shaftsupported on an entablature carried by four ironpillars. 26This structure now carries only the mezzanineat the second story level but that comparison givesa picture of the visual size of these engines and,thethe dramatic power they must have displayed in operation.The water company allowed visitors in the pump chambersin the early twentieth century and probably in the

21nineteenth so it is possible that the pumps were designedwith as much attention to visual display as was theengine house itself.Today there is no way of knowingexcept by looking at other pumps of the same time.The Ridgewood water works for Brooklyn, New York,were under construction in 1860 and were very similarin engineering design to Louisville's.Two cornishengines filled a central chamber powered by coal-firedboilers located in the side wings.These engines werebuilt in Hartford by Woodruff and Beach27and were veryhandsome pieces of machinery (see figure five).Thewalking beam was pierced with Gothic motifs while itssupport structure was articulated with pointed arches andgrouped colonettes giving the whole structure a gracefulGothic Revival effect.The various cylinders lent them-selves less easily to such motifs so they were crownedwith moldings of a more classical style.Conformityto one style was not, in this instance at least, adriving consideration since the engine house itself wasdesigned in a Renaissance manner (see figure 6).Ridge-wood required no standpipe and was not located on ahighly visible site but its pumps and engine house werewell decorated.It is not likely that Louisville'sengines were treated plainly, and probable that similarGothic motifs were used where possible, but so far there

22is unfortunately no way of knowing for sure.One indica-tion of their possible state of decoration is in thesurviving architecture.The side wings, which containedthe coal fired boilers, were not generally open to thepublic and received no elaborate architectural finishing,while the pump chamber was richly endowed with doorand window trim and a heavy cornice molding beneath acoved ceiling.The mezzanine, though supported on plainiron pipe columns and reached by a very utilitarianspiral stair, has a heavy balustraded railing (seefigures seven andeight.) Figure seven gives something ofthe effect of the pump chamber as it once looked thoughthe pumps shown are those that replaced the originalpumps in 1912.Figure eight shows the later changes madewhen the pumps were completely removed in 1937.Notethat the bracket supporting the mezzanine near the dooris carved in an acanthus leaf pattern while the onefarther into the room is unembellished.The originalpumps probably showed a similar juxtaposition of elegance andutility that survives in the main pump chamber.Scowden's design could at times be very uninhibited.

Chapter IIIThe unconventionalities in Scowden's architecturaldesign contributed to, rather than detracted from, theoverall polish of the Pumping station.It is not aneasy task to combine a conservative Palladian organizationand Roman Classical ornamentation, with an industrialfunction requiring two enormous smoke stacks, a 132 footstand pipe, and necessary storage for large quantitiesof coal.Add to this a lack of extensive architecturalexperience on Scowden's part and one realizes how remarkable his accomplishment truly was.Only two other buildings are on record as havingbeen designed by Scowden before he came to Louisville,both were water works. 28 He updated the Cincinnati systemin 1845, and designed the engine house with more concernfor utility than grace.(see figure nine).The austereGreek Revival structure was crowned with smoke stacksclearly derived from his steamboat days.The water worksdesigned for Cleveland in 1852 (see figureten)showssome improvement in that the stand pipe dominated thesingle smoke stack, but the proportions of both were stillawkwardly tall.They were attached to

The Louisville Water Works Pumping Station Number One Margaret Wheeler Hilliard B.A. Smith College, 1972 A Thesis Presented to the Faculty . but to the Louisville Water Company itself and its officers, and employees over the 120 years of its existence, I offer my special gratitude. Without the care with which this company has preserved .