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You would not have wanted to drink it: Philadelphia’s water supply in 1884
This excerpt, from the report of Chief Engineer William Ludlow, provides an overview of the failed attempts to keep the Schuylkill River’s Fairmount pool – from which 80 percent of the City’s water was withdrawn- free from pollution. Of special interest to me is the discussion of sewage pollution, and the dangers it posed to…
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Catch and Release: Photographs Documenting the Catching and Recatching of the Same Fish
By releasing their catches instead of eating them (especially fish that are listed in the consumption advisories as not safe to consume), serious anglers do their part to assure that there will always be fish in the rivers and streams. An added benefit is that this allows the chance for themselves and other anglers to…
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Overbrook, as it was. A brief history of the Overbrook neighborhood of Philadelphia, focusing on changes in the natural landscape.
I am presenting this page more or less as I wrote it for PhillyH2O in 2005. Now, almost 20 years later, many more resources are available to anyone doing this type of neighborhood research, and I could add a plethora of photographs and new information from newspaper databases and books that have been published since.…
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Newspaper Clipping Scrapbooks of Frederic Graff Jr.,Chief Engineer of the Philadelphia Water Department: Part 1, 1854-1857
This is the first part of a two part collection of clippings collected by Frederick Graff Jr., Chief Engineer of the Philadelphia Water Department during the middle of the 19th century. Conserved, mounted and bound, the scrapbook contains 130 pages of clippings on a wide variety of topics, reflecting Graff’s wide interests and activities. PDF…
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Newspaper Clipping Scrapbooks of Frederick Graff Jr., Chief Engineer of the Philadelphia Water Department. Part 2: 1858-1871
This is the second part of a two part collection of clippings collected by Frederick Graff Jr., Chief Engineer of the Philadelphia Water Department, during the middle of the 19th century. Conserved and mounted on 12″ x 18″ archival board, the scrapbook contains about 35 pages numbered 125 through 160. The variety of topics covered…
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Board of Health Newspaper Clipping Scrapbooks at City Archives of Philadelphia, 1891-1908
I first examined these fragile scrapbooks back in 1998, compiling the following selective list of clippings relating to sewers, water pollution, water filtration, typhoid and other diseases, and anything else that caught my attention. The first line of each listing is the date of the clipping; the second line is the newspaper name, scrapbook page…
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Leverington Avenue Stormwater Sewer
This article by Adam Levine discusses the Leverington Avenue stormwater sewer, which drains a small section of Manayunk with an outfall at the Manayunk Canal. The flow of a small stream that once crossed Leverington at Silverwood Street, and was captured in a sewer, is included in that drainage. This sewer was a small piece…
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Sewers, Pollution, and Public Health in 19th Century Philadelphia
This article, by Adam Levine, first appeared in Pennsylvania Legacies, v. 10, n.1 (May 2010), p. 14-19, published by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. For about 100 years, from roughly the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, Philadelphia poured raw sewage into its two major rivers, the Delaware and the Schuylkill, which also served as the…
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Dock Creek Sewer in 1849: A report on its condition made to City Councils
This tidal creek, which flowed through the oldest part of the Philadelphia, was the first of the city’s streams to be put into an underground sewer. Leather tanners had been using and misusing the waters of Dock Creek from the city’s earliest days, both to fill the vats in which they soaked their animal hides, and…