by David DeKok
Chamot’s knowledge of waterborne diseases seemed fairly up to date for an American scientist in 1901. He based what he told the Board of Health on his own observations under the microscope and did not subscribe to the moralistic and fallacious belief that diseases like typhoid sprang to life from the miasma, meaning dirt and filth. We will discuss this fallacy more fully in a future chapter. Yet he was not completely free of erroneous beliefs. Chamot readily acknowledged, for example, that the two creeks were subject to occasional farm pollution. But he did not believe this was a significant threat by the time the water reached Ithaca. That may have been a manifestation of a mistaken belief, common into the twentieth century, that if pollution flows far enough in a river, it will be diluted into insignificance.6 Or he may have so badly wanted a safe alternative to the foul Ithaca wells that he was willing to overlook problems with the quality of Six Mile Creek and Buttermilk Creek water.
He told the Board of Health that the best thing that could be done to eliminate the risk of something deadly like typhoid coming into the streams from the distant country would be to install “mammoth filters,” either an English-style sand filter or the American-style mechanical filter. Filters had been proven to save lives, greatly reducing typhoid and cholera outbreaks in European cities and in Albany, New York. Otherwise, the Daily News reported, the city water “is reasonably pure and is good to drink.”7 But Chamot’s warning that the water ought to be filtered fell on deaf ears. Fires and having enough water to fight fires were what worried people the most.
The Treman family had considered several plans for building a new dam and reservoir for Ithaca but rejected all of them as too costly.8 Shortly after Morris took over Ithaca Water Works, a member of the Cornell University Board of Trustees—never identified—asked Professor Gardner S. Williams of the engineering faculty to meet with Morris “with a view to an engagement.” Williams had designed and built dams all over the Midwest. He had come to Cornell in 1898 from Detroit, where he was chief engineer for the city water board.9 There were many engineers who could do this sort of work, but Williams was experimenting with designs and materials he hoped would reduce the cost of a dam without compromising safety.
Williams was in charge of Cornell’s hydraulics laboratory.10 Built next to Triphammer Falls, the laboratory, one of the largest in the world of its day, was for “the study of water’s behavior.” Cornell University liked to hire teachers for its engineering schools who already had a professional reputation and were familiar with the ways of business. As we shall see, Williams was a bit of a cowboy. He would build dams for anyone who paid his fee and does not seem to have been overly particular about whom he worked for. Indeed, he ended his career in 1930 designing a massive and misconceived dam for Josef Stalin at Magnitogorsk in the Soviet Union as part of the First Five-Year Plan.11 Williams and Morris signed a contract on November 27, 1901, the day after the Health Board meeting at which Chamot spoke.12
“I made an investigation of the water supply of the city of Ithaca,” Williams later testified. “It was realized at the time that the works were not in a suitable condition to meet the requirements and I was asked to give the company the benefit of my advice to best produce a supply that would be satisfactory to the citizens of Ithaca.”13
Many in Ithaca believed that Morris would build a new reservoir atop East Hill. The Ithaca Daily News on November 16 speculated it would be built near the Lehigh Valley Railroad’s East Ithaca Station, which was then located on Maple Avenue near Cascadilla Creek. But Morris quickly gave up on that idea, if it ever even reached that stage, and thereafter went silent about his plans for nearly two months, causing immense public frustration.
Williams worked two months on the design. He considered nearly every major water source in the region. Taking water from Cayuga Lake was ruled out because it was polluted with Ithaca’s sewage at its southern end and would cost too much to pump uphill in any case. Fall Creek, Cascadilla Creek, Enfield Creek, Buttermilk Creek, and artesian wells tapping pressurized pockets of groundwater also failed to pass muster. Williams finally settled on Six Mile Creek. Ithaca Water Works already drew the major part of its water supply from the stream but had done almost nothing to tap its potential.14 Williams was attracted to a location two miles above Ithaca where Six Mile Creek flowed through a deep gorge only 90 feet wide. Here, he told Morris, was the perfect location for a ninety-foot-high dam that would back up a sixty-acre lake in the valley beyond the gorge. Ithaca would have all the water it needed, more than twenty million gallons per day. Without the dam, there would be no more water than there was now.
The professor was not as sanguine as Chamot about the safety and quality of the water from Six Mile Creek. After storms, tap water was muddy. And as he later testified, the amount of bacteria in the water was “considerably higher than I would think desirable.” He had looked at the map of Six Mile Creek’s forty-seven-square-mile drainage area and feared for the safety of his family. Williams had no illusions about the sanitary habits of “country people,” some of whom had outhouses that emptied directly into the stream. He ordered all the water used in his household to be boiled and advised friends to do the same. So it came as no surprise when he made a strong recommendation to Morris to build a filtration plant for Six Mile Creek before he put up the new dam. He surely told him about the high bacteria count in Six Mile Creek water samples.
But why build the filtration plant before the dam? That had to do with the typically foul sanitary habits of construction workers in the field, so common a problem in 1901 that some engineering and public health books of the day contained warnings to anyone building a reservoir. Amory Prescott Folwell, for example, wrote in his 1900 book, Water Supply Engineering, that “care should be taken that the soil is not polluted by the workmen upon the reservoir; to prevent which, [outhouses] should be provided below the dam site and the workmen compelled to use them.” William T. Sedgwick wrote in Principles of Sanitary Science and the Public Health in 1903 that “serious pollutions . . . may occur in surface [water] supplies from the temporary residence on the watershed of thousands of laborers, some of whom may be walking cases of infectious disease.”15
So Williams proposed building a sand filter for Ithaca’s drinking water.16 Sand filtration plants had become relentless typhoid fighters in Europe since the first one was built for the London water system in 1829. In Hamburg, Germany, the death rate from typhoid plunged from 34 per 100,000 in 1892, the last year before filtration, to 6 per 100,000 in 1894.17 Yet filtration was a hard sell in America, where the population used five to six times as much water per capita as Europeans did, and where it was long assumed that new supplies of unpolluted water could always be found, or if not, so what?18 This indifference to pollution when an easy solution from Europe existed was a source of frustration to American sanitary engineers. “Still, curiously enough, there are some who discuss sand filtration as practiced abroad very much as they do the subject of air navigation and the mobile perpetuum [perpetual motion machines]—things very interesting in themselves, but quite impossible of practical results,” wrote John W. Hill in his 1898 book, The Purification of Public Water Supplies.19 Old Europe’s advanced practices were no more welcome then than they are in the national health-care debate today.
Part of the problem in 1901 was that American courts almost never held water companies liable for deaths caused by water they delivered to customers, so there was no financial incentive to improve. Anyone who did bring a lawsuit faced daunting hurdles, having to prove first, that the water company intended to defraud or deceive the public about the quality of its water; second, that it was guilty of criminal negligence; third, that there was no doubt that the water was the cause of death; and finally, that the victim had not negligently contributed to his or her own demise by drinking the water in the face of public knowledge that it was polluted.20
Nevertheless, increasing numbers of American cities, motivated by public he
alth more than profit, embraced water filtration in the late 1890s. Albany’s plant, the largest European-style sand filtration plant in America, began processing Hudson River water in the fall of 1899. Typhoid had been rampant in New York’s capital city, but deaths dropped dramatically after the filters began removing 99 percent of bacteria in the river water. In Elmira, New York, just thirty-three miles from Ithaca and where Morris had friends, the results were equally dramatic. Some 287 typhoid cases attributed to city water were reported in 1896, the year before filtration began, and just thirty-eight in 1898, the first full year afterward.21
Other Americans took notice and wondered why they could not have the same precautions. On January 4, 1901, a U.S. Senate committee held a hearing at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City to consider whether the nation’s capital should filter drinking water from the Potomac River. All the best experts attended. The main issue quickly became not whether to filter, but which filtration system to use. The choices were the “English” slow sand filter, which mimicked the natural filtration of the Earth and had been used successfully in Europe for seventy years, or the “American” mechanical filter, which was somewhat speedier and used coagulant chemicals to remove more dirt particles from water than sand filtration did. Each filter had its proponents and detractors—sand filter proponents, for example, claimed that mechanical filters made water look nice but didn’t remove as much bacteria—and arguments could be intense.
In the end there was no way to force a water company or local government to filter water, because no law or regulation required anyone to do so. Too often, filtration was seen as an unnecessary expense. As Allen Hazen, designer of the Albany filtration plant, wrote in 1895:
The one unfortunate feature is the question of cost. Not that the cost is excessive or beyond the means of American communities; in point of fact, exactly the reverse is the case; but we have been so long accustomed to obtain drinking water without expense other than pumping that any cost tending to improve quality seems excessive.22
Morris did not make an immediate decision on the filtration plant. He approved the ninety-foot dam on Six Mile Creek when Williams showed him the final plans early in January 1902, and he must have marveled at how slight it appeared on the drawings, just eight feet wide at the base and jammed between the walls of the gorge. Williams had designed America’s first dome dam, so named for its curvature, and was able to make it smaller and more cost-effective because of that design and because he would use reinforced concrete. He was supremely confident that his dam was safe, and Morris gave the go-ahead to begin construction.23
The two-month silence on what he intended to do with Ithaca Water Works, though, had the city in an uproar, mainly because people really cared about what the answer might be. Finally, on January 14, 1902, the Ithaca Business Men’s Association approved a resolution calling for the city to “own and operate a first class system of waterworks.” The following evening, Ithaca Common Council debated the question, giving every indication that it was amenable to the idea. Probably in response to the growing agitation, Morris released Williams’s plans for Ithaca Water Works on January 26—minus the recommendation for the filtration plant—and soon found himself in a full-scale battle to prevent the city of Ithaca from taking over the system by eminent domain.
An interesting part of Williams’s report is his outright mendacity about Six Mile Creek and its suitability for use as drinking water. First he diverts attention to Fall Creek, which ran through the Cornell campus and provided the unfiltered drinking water used at the university. He called it “unfit for drinking purposes” and stated that filtration would cost as much as pumping water uphill from Cayuga Lake. Then he gave his stamp of approval to Six Mile Creek, the same water he boiled at home because it was full of bacteria. “As to the quality of the water, Professor Williams raises no question, but says that it will be improved by storage for considerable periods” the Ithaca Daily Journal reported.24 Council was not impressed. A week later, citizens jammed its chambers. Petitions in favor of a public takeover were presented by three local unions, the Masons, the Tinners, and the Journeymen Tailors, along with one signed by some 120 Ithaca women. Council voted to hold a municipal referendum on February 27 on the question, “Shall the city acquire its own water works system both for fire purposes and the use of its inhabitants?”25
Morris was not about to have his investment taken away, and over the next three weeks, mounted an aggressive campaign to win a “no” vote in the referendum. Because of either naïveté or foolishness by the Common Council—news stories do not reveal its thinking on this question—the election was limited to property owners, who could vote as many times as the number of properties they owned in the city. And they didn’t even have to go and vote themselves—they could send agents to vote for them. It was tailor-made for Ithaca’s landlord class, who stood to benefit from Morris’s plan to improve fire service. We are so used to the concept today of “one man, one vote” that this voting system seems almost cartoonishly wrong, but in fact not until the 1960s did the U.S. Supreme Court enshrine the concept.
Even as the people of Ithaca agitated for public water, the Treman establishment began to fight back. On February 4, Judge Francis Miles Finch appeared at the Ithaca Common Council finance committee meeting along with Morris, Mynderse Van Cleef, and Williams to denounce the idea of Ithaca running its own water system. Finch, of course, was vice president of Ithaca Trust Company, which had financed Morris’s acquisition of Ithaca Water Works, but no one called him out on the conflict of interest.
“Every such step is a drift toward socialism,” said the elderly Finch, sounding at times like a twenty-first-century Tea Party member in his comments to the Ithaca Daily Journal. “The people are governed too much already, losing their personal freedom, and multiplying tyrants.” He predicted a municipal takeover would bring oppressive increases in debt and taxation. “If an effort is made to ruin the company and despoil its bond holders, who are mainly our own tax paying citizens and the University . . . by the destructive competition of a new city works, we must expect the company to fight for its life to the ultimate tribunal of the United States Supreme Court,” Finch said. “Why should it not? Any of us would do the same.”26
If the public needed more reason to vote for public water, it came on February 11 when Professor Chamot released the first results of water testing he had done under contract for the Board of Health. He gathered samples at City Hall and the East Hill School, carefully sealing them in sterilized glass bottles and taking them back to his laboratory. There, he drew out a small amount of each sample, placed each in separate petri dishes, and added agar, a gelatinous material derived from algae that acted as a sort of fertilizer for the bacteria. Then he placed the petri dishes in a warm, damp incubator for forty-eight hours to grow the bacteria in the water. When the “baking” was done, he examined the samples under his microscope and counted the bacteria colonies that had formed. The City Hall sample had 800 colonies per cubic centimeter, Chamot said, and was “of very poor quality.” Indeed, that was eight times the level of bacteria allowed in London water after filtration. The bacteria, he said, came from “putrefying organic matter of objectionable quality,” meaning human or animal feces.27 There were wicked things in the water.
Perhaps in response to Chamot’s report, but also in response to much public comment on the poor quality of Ithaca water, Judge Finch on February 11 told the Ithaca Daily Journal that if Common Council would only stop its efforts to take over the water system, Ithaca Water Works was prepared to build a water filtration plant. Morris certainly authorized him to make that statement. Had Professor Williams finally convinced Morris of the need to incur this extra expense?
In the days leading up to the referendum, Morris employed “opposition talkers” to buttonhole voters on the street and persuade them to vote against public water. An inflammatory pamphlet, “Yes or No?,” opposing the takeover wa
s widely distributed. Among its arguments was one asserting that Ithaca Water Works had “invested its capital freely, and did not let its work out to Dago [Italian] contractors, or do its work on a cheap-John plan.” Those words would come back to haunt Ithaca Water Works and Morris.
On election day, Morris’s people boasted that they had a list with the names of eight hundred people who said they would vote no in the referendum. The water company hired carriages to bring its voters to the poll. Problems developed at the polling place. Some would-be voters discovered that they not only had to be property owners and taxpayers to cast ballots, but that the properties had to be listed in their own names on the assessment rolls. So even if they paid the taxes on an inherited property, they could not vote if the house was still listed in their father’s name. The man in charge of the official voter list, assessor J. P. Merrill, was an outspoken opponent of public water. And of course, there was the multiple voting. Some agents for landlords cast ten to thirty-seven votes, and it came to be believed by proponents of public water that this odd electoral system had turned the tide in Morris’s favor. The final tally was 718 opposed to public water, 583 in favor.
Morris quickly set up shop in Ithaca. Thomas W. Summers, his manager and superintendent, had been living in Ithaca since December, but now Morris’s attorney, George S. Sheppard, rented an office above 123 E. State St. from a Common Council member and a house at 111 W. Green St. from Mary King, who planned to travel abroad with her daughter. Sheppard was a longtime friend of Morris’s from Penn Yan who had attended Columbia University Law School for two of the three years Van Cleef was there. Morris took a room in the house with Sheppard and his family. Williams continued work on his design for the ninety-foot dam. Ithaca residents did not yet know how high the dam was going to be.