Exhibit Reviews “THE FAIRMOUNT WATERWORKS, 1812-1911,” AT THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART DONALD C. JACKSON Although not the first municipal waterworks in the United States (a distinction belonging to the Moravian settlement at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania), the Fairmount Waterworks is probably the most re nowned American public works construction of the 19th century. Alarmed by the yellow fever epidemics of 1793 and 1798, in the latter year Philadelphia’s civic leaders accepted Benjamin Latrobe’s pro posal for building a steam-powered pumping plant to distribute water from the Schuylkill River on the western edge of the city. Latrobe’s Center Square Waterworks began operating in 1801 and, despite high fuel costs, minimal storage capacity, and mechanical operating diffi culties, it provided service for more than a decade. But by 1811 the city’s Watering Committee was seeking to replace the Center Square facility with a larger, more efficient plant. Consequently, Frederick Graff (with assistance from John Davis) set out to develop a new waterworks on the Schuylkill at the foot of a prominent rise known as Fairmount. Graff’s plan involved pumping water up to a sizable reservoir on top of Fairmount and then letting it flow by gravity to users throughout the city. Construction of the initial steam-powered Fairmount system started in mid-1812 and regular service com menced on September 7, 1815. Although subjected to major techno logical changes and expansion, including conversion from steam to waterpower in the early 1820s, the Fairmount Waterworks served city residents for almost 100 years. Pollution problems and expanding municipal needs finally rendered the plant obsolete, and in 1911 the city authorized conversion of the site to other uses. Today, the complex is a much-beloved part of the city’s Fairmount Park, and Graff’s brainchild recently benefited from a major archiDr . Jackson is the author of Great American Bridges and Dams (Washington, D.C.: Preservation Press, 1988). He is a research fellow with the Transformation of Philadelphia project at the University of Pennsylvania, studying the history of bridges and transportation in the Delaware Valley before 1850.© 1989 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/89/3003-0004$01.00 635 636 Donald C. Jackson tectural restoration effort sponsored by the Fairmount Park Commis sion, the Philadelphia Water Department, and the Junior League of Philadelphia. In concert with this, the Philadelphia Museum of Art staged an impressive temporary exhibit to “help focus attention on the history and future of one of the city’s most charming landmarks.” To say the least, the museum offers an ideal setting for the exhibit because it is only a few hundred yards from the waterworks and sits directly on the site of the former reservoir. Open to the public for a two-month period during the summer of 1988, the Fairmount exhibit was simply mounted in a large rectangular room. Organized under the direction of curator Darrell Sewell, with Jane Mork Gibson providing historical research and writing, it was not a fancy or complicated installation. However, the chronological ar rangement of prints, paintings, photographs, drawings, sculpture, and other memorabilia around the room provided a clear overview of the waterworks’ historical development from the Center Square era through its conversion into an aquarium in 1911 (see fig. 1). Drawn from a variety of sources, including the art museum’s own collection, the Franklin Institute Science Museum, the Historical Society of Penn sylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Atwater Kent Museum, the American Philosophical Society, and the Commissioners of Fairmount Park, over 120 items were integrated into the final exhibit. The exhibit did not include any schematic drawings or graphics to supplement the historic artifacts and help explain operation of the waterworks system. Perhaps a techno logical museum would have taken a different tack in this regard, but the exhibit as presented did not suffer from the curator’s decision to exclude new descriptive material. Visually, the most compelling artifacts were two emblematic figures commissioned by the city’s Watering Committee in the 1820s to decorate the exterior of the newly built mill house. Executed by the American artist William Rush, these painted...