Map Lover’s Monday: Looking for Cleaner Water

by Adam Levine on

Surveys for a future water supply for Philadelphia, 1883 to 1886

PLATE 1. Map showing the watersheds of the Delaware, Schuylkill and Lehigh Rivers, with distribution of population. 1885. Depicts the Delaware River watershed above Philadelphia, showing all tributaries in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Special attention is given to several watersheds – the Lehigh River, the Delaware River north of the Water Gap, Perkiomen Creek, and Neshaminy Creek – that were being considered as new water sources for Philadelphia.

These beautiful maps were part of a four-year effort to find a cleaner (and safer) water supply for Philadelphia to replace the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers, which were becoming increasingly polluted by sewage and factory wastes. This effort focused on damming streams in upstate watersheds and carrying the water into the city via aqueducts. This work was led by Rudolph Hering (1847-1923), who had been an assistant engineer for the city’s Department of Surveys until the early 1880s. Hering was sent to Europe in 1880 to look at sewerage works in several countries, and when he came home he wrote a report that included a less-than-positive assessment of the Philadelphia system. This report got him into hot water with his boss, Chief Surveyor and Engineer Samuel L. Smedley. Hering left the Department in 1881, only to be hired back a few years later as “engineer in charge” of the “surveys for a future water supply.”

Rudolph Hering
Rudolph Hering, ca. 1900 (PWD) After leaving Phildelphia, Hering became one of the leading sanitary engineers in the country. For an overview of his career, see this obituary from the Journal of the American Water Works Association. The National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution has a Rudolph Hering Collection; perusing the finding aid at this link will give you some idea of the scope of his work throughout the United States and in other countries.

The 1880s plan – like all the plans for a new water supply that were ever made for the city – was never undertaken. Philadelphia, with three water filtration plants, still gets its drinking water from the two rivers that run through it.

For more information than you would ever want to know about the Hering’s plan, you can consult the PWD annual reports for 1883, 1884, 1885, and 1886. The reports include surveys of all the major watersheds north of Philadelphia; accurate rainfall and stream flow records; and many proposals for reservoirs. If you don’t have the time to read all these reports, with maps on this page serve as a visual summary of this work.

NOTE ON THE SCANS
I made these scans about 15 years ago, and because of the limits of technology at the time, they were only scanned at 150 dpi. That said, the details should still be easily readable. The annual report volumes had paper copies of all these maps folded in; the maps with the yellow fold lines were among those. PWD also had unfolded linen-backed copies of two of the two maps, from which I made the cleaner, unlined scans presented here.

PLATE II. Map showing proposed lines of aqueducts from the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers and Perkiomen Creek, also available watersheds of the Neshaminy, Tohickon, Mill, and Perkiomen Creeks, and of certain tributaries of the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers north of the Blue Mountains. 1885
PLATES III and IV. Profiles of proposed aqueduct lines: Philadelphia to Perkiomen Creek. Philadelphia to Point Pleasant. Perkiomen Creek to Lehigh River. Point Pleasant to Delaware Water Gap. [1885 ca.]
Topographical map showing the watersheds of the Perkiomen, Tohickon and Neshaminy creeks, from surveys made by the Philadelphia Water Dept in 1883, 1884 and 1885, and from atlas published by the State Geological Survey in 1883. Also, available storage reservoirs. 1886
Topographical map of the Perkiomen water basin and neighboring watersheds in Bucks and Montgomery
Counties surveyed for the service of the Philadelphia Water Department by William Ludlow, Chief Engineer, Rudolph Hering, Engineer in Charge, F. L. Paddock, Chief Topographer. Published by the Geological Survey of Pennsylvania to assist and illustrate the exploration of the Triassic belt. On a horizontal scale of 1600 feet to one inch with lines of vertical elevations every 10 feet. J. P. Lesley, State Geologist, Charles Ashburner, Geologist in Charge. 1887

The image above serves as an index to 12 topographical maps, created for the Pennsylvania Geological Survey, that are part of the PWD collection. These cover parts of Montgomery and Bucks Counties, north of Philadelphia, and were used as the basis for the smaller Perkiomen, Tohickon, and Neshaminy map above it.

I spent a long time piecing together a composite of my old scans of these 12 maps, which is too large to present on this site in any form. After doing this, I checked online and found a set of scans twice the resolution of the ones I made years ago. These can be seen at a comprehensive Penn State Libraries digital portal that includes scans of all the reports and maps created by the four Pennsylvania Geological Surveys.

The twelve contiguous sheets show proposed aqueducts, conduits, dam sites, and watershed boundaries, as well as roads, houses, barns, creameries, tanneries, shops, machine shops, shoe shops, hay houses, post offices, ice houses, seminaries, factories, mills (including many grist and saw mills), mill races, hotels, schools, churches, tollhouses, stores, railroad stations, and other structures, cemeteries, woodland, rain gauges, stream gauges, and triangulation stations. Some of the specific places, creeks and railroads named on these maps are listed below.

FEEDBACK