Water Works - A History of West Hartford's Reservoirs

Story by Leonard Felson | Photo by John Horak

The news in the Hartford papers in April 1865 was historic. The Civil War ended on April 9 and five days later President Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated.

Beyond those major stories, the city’s two major dailies, The Hartford Times and The Hartford Courant, reported the more mundane news of the city and region. Among the items was the so-called “water question,” or how to supply clean drinking water to a growing city that had surged past 30,000 people just after the 1860 census and showed no sign of abating.

The problem had begun years earlier. Since 1855, water had been pumped up from the Connecticut River, but people complained about its taste. The water was far from pristine, the river serving as a major waterway for steamboats and freight to and from New York and beyond. By 1860, Hiram Bissell, president of the city’s water commission, pushed for construction of a reservoir in West Hartford, which had only incorporated as an independent town in 1854. Before that it had been part of Hartford.

The supply would come from the Trout Brook and its tributaries, a source whose elevation was above Hartford, which would allow gravity to deliver water through an aqueduct system without the need for costly pumps. As efficient and necessary as it sounds, it was not an easy sell.

Mostly agrarian West Hartford wanted little to do with the congestion of the city down by the river. Negotiations were slow, and the city water commission itself voted down the proposal twice before reconsidering the plan in the 1860s during the Civil War, finally giving Bissell authority to begin buying the farmlands needed to build the reservoir.

Meanwhile, the city had commissioned Benjamin Silliman, a Yale chemist, to study the Trout Brook system, and he found one of its northern streams, Mine Brook, to be the purest. It was there at the confluence of the Mine Brook and Trout Brook where Reservoir No. 1 was built near what was then called Farmington Road (later changed to Farmington Avenue).

Fifteen acres of pastureland were first acquired, and then more tracts totaling 53 additional acres, as laborers and masons began to erect an earthen dam. But political wrangling continued at City Hall, led by Eliphalet Bulkeley, a Republican, who opposed a city-owned water works. He and his colleague William Hungerford were able to force a city-wide referendum that made it more difficult to bring water to Hartford. Instead of requiring a simple majority to approve the plan, they managed to force a threshold that all but doomed it: a three-fifths majority.

On a hot Saturday in July 1865, three months after the end of the Civil War, the vote was held throughout the city’s six wards. With 3,236 ballots, the measure exceeded the three-fifths majority by 132 votes, paving the way for a new chapter in the region’s history.

“The initial reservoir was the all-important first step in building the huge and efficient water system,” writes Kevin Murphy in his excellent Water for Hartford, a 2004 history of the Hartford Water Works and the Metropolitan District Commission. “While the Connecticut River water, along with other rivers in America, deteriorated each year, Hartford’s water department was able to impound even larger bodies of pure water in the hills west of the city.” The cost to build the first reservoir was $161,000.

Within three weeks of the vote, Reservoir No. 1 was under construction. Nearly completed by the end of 1865, it included the earthen dam constructed with a foundation of broken stone. With the aqueduct to be laid through West Hartford Center, the system did not begin supplying the city’s 35,000 residents and West Hartford residents near the aqueduct until January 1867. When it did, water officials for the first time shut down the Connecticut River Pumping Station.
Bissell knew one reservoir would not be enough for the growing city. Residents were wasting water at an alarming rate, using 100,000 gallons at the peak morning hours of 8 and 9, and another 50,000 gallons between 1 and 2 in the morning, just because they were in the habit of keeping water running overnight, often to avoid pipes freezing.

Bissell recommended water meters be installed, a system adopted by more and more U.S. cities by the late 1860s. But it would not be until 1902 that Hartford would have all its customers on meters.

The water chief learned another lesson from building the first reservoir. It took time — nearly seven years since talk began in 1860 to make it happen. So as soon as city officials approved a second reservoir, Bissell sent surveyors into the woods of Reservoir No. 1 to plot three more basins. Two of them would be built further up Mine Brook.

But then, disaster struck.

By 1867, with the second reservoir half done, Reservoir No. 1 showed signs of leakage as water oozed through lower portions of the dam. Then on Sept. 5, 1867, a six-hour downpour dumped rain onto the Talcott Mountain watershed near the reservoir. Water cascaded down Mine Brook and by the next morning, the dam had given way. In 22 minutes, water cut a 125-foot chasm through the middle of the dam, emptying its 200 million gallons onto the Trout Brook Valley. Farms were devastated. Floodwater uprooted trees and swept away stone from the dam’s core. The cascade even damaged a main bridge in West Hartford Center. Amazingly, no one was injured.

One consequence of the disaster was the need to turn back to the river for water, and the Connecticut River Pumping Station was called back into service.
By 1869, the second reservoir was completed, and by 1870, the first reservoir was in use again following backbreaking work for laborers who hauled a mountain of stones back into place for the dam’s core wall.

Other factors affected the supply of water. By the 1870s, manual lawnmowers were growing in popularity, but they scalped lawns so much that the only way to keep grass healthy was to pour lots of water on it. Customers’ water use had climbed to 2 1/2 times the amount required a year before. It didn’t help that the rate of rain was more than a third below what fell on average over the two earlier decades. And meanwhile, the city’s population continued to grow, all of which meant a third reservoir was needed in West Hartford.

City and water officials, however, did not immediately recognize the need. They failed to see that a drought in the Midwest would soon move into New England. At the time, Hartford could rely on the upland water source for 10 months a year, turning to the Connecticut River by November.

But the drought came and lasted 15 years, and by the early 1870s, officials knew they had to increase the water supply, none perhaps more than Bissell’s successor, Ezra Clark, who became president of the water commission in the early 1870s. New pumps with larger capacity were ordered for the Connecticut River, yet the firm contracted to do the work was slow to complete it, and the drought continued. By 1873, the West Hartford reservoirs had only a 24-hour supply remaining and the aqueduct to the city was virtually dry. The new river pumps were not yet completed, and spigots and taps were running dry. Finally, at the last minute, as a water famine faced the region, the new pumps were connected, averting a massive crisis.

It was around that time that officials authorized the construction of a third reservoir, which was completed in 1875. A fourth soon followed, but engineers and new water board leaders knew larger capacity would be needed.

By the 1880s, the city had more than one billion gallons of water as it entered the summer months each year, and the drought was no longer a concern. Officials began to address other problems like replacing old pipe connections and installing water meters. A fifth smaller reservoir was built in 1884, designed to collect spring runoff from Reservoirs No. 2 and 3.

Hartford’s population had by then reached 48,000 people, and like elsewhere across America, the city was changing. By the last decade of the 19th century, electricity was commonplace, and the telephone was gaining popularity.
And yet water conservation was still an unknown concept. At livery stables, hoses were left running most of the day as they were at beer saloons. Toilets ran 24 hours a day.

The only solution was to build another reservoir. Ezra Clark found a sixth site along another Trout Brook tributary called Tumbledown Brook, which ran through West Hartford and Bloomfield. The reservoir, known as Reservoir 6, off Albany Avenue, would impound a billion gallons a year, almost equaling the capacity of the five other reservoirs combined. Two hundred men and 60 horses guided wooden scoops through the rocky soil. To speed completion, the number increased to 500 men and 150 horses in 1893. The work was slow and the equipment had not improved since Reservoir No. 1 had been built. But by the fall of 1895, the sixth reservoir was done.

Around the same time, Clark completed a series of bridle paths through the maze of reservoirs, and the site became a popular place to visit on Sundays.

From 1896 to 1910, Hartford had little concern about its water supply. Newspapers stopped publishing daily tallies of the water levels at the reservoirs. Water usage began to fall for the first time in the city’s history as customers learned to curb their usage.

By 1920, with cars gaining in popularity, people were moving to the suburbs, and as West Hartford’s population had tripled, talk surfaced of a need for a regional water agency. In 1930, the Connecticut General Assembly authorized creation of the Metropolitan District Commission. Then in 1949, a 9-mile long catchment holding 32 billion gallons of water was built at another upland site in western Connecticut called the Barkhamsted Reservoir.

Today, the West Hartford Reservoirs serve primarily as water filtration plants, and the 3,000 acres attract thousands of area residents year-round into the woodlands and trail system. Water flows by gravity through pipes to the treatment facilities, where an average of 55 million gallons of water is treated daily. The MDC provides water to more than 90,000 customers and 400,000 people in eight member towns and parts of six others.

If the West Hartford reservoirs had not been built, the region would have been like many Midwestern cities that rely on poorer quality river water, says Kennedy, author of Water for Hartford. “If Hiram Bissell had failed -- and he almost did because the dam burst -- if he had failed to convince the Republicans, had failed and had to go back to the river water, Hartford would be just like Cincinnati and the other towns.” But the reservoirs proved that the region could build a system that held and delivered a great upland source of clean water, despite a history of many challenges.

Major source for this article was “Water for Hartford,” by Kevin Murphy. (2004)

Leonard Felson is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to Seasons magazines. He can be reached at www.leonardfelson.com.