Water and light — the utilities of safety

1855–1881 · WHAT THE DEPARTMENT FOUGHT WITH, AND SAW BY

Canal water and cisterns: For many years the fire department drew its water by laying long lines of hose to the canal. As the building area spread beyond the canal's reach, the city built cisterns at the distant points; they grew in number to thirty-four, and they served until the municipal water system came, when they were abandoned and filled with earth. (The Allen County Public Library's Gilded Age in Fort Wayne tells the same of the era before 1879: the fire company drew from the canal or from one of thirty-four cisterns at strategic places.) The sicknesses of the canal-and-cistern years belong to the city's epidemic record, which this history carries only in pieces; the water story is told here on its own.

The waterworks fight, 1875–1880: Agitation for a municipally owned waterworks ran from 1875 into the councilmanic election of 1876, and it turned on whose water the city would drink. The owners of the disused feeder canal — which brought the St. Joseph river's water seven miles into the city — offered to sell the city their waterway and to build a plant to the plans of the hydraulic engineer Moses Lane: $380,000, including 21.18 miles of pipe and a standpipe five feet in diameter and two hundred feet high. A majority of the council favored the canal water, but citizens restrained the council by court order, and at the election every candidate who favored canal water was defeated. On 15 May 1879 the new council authorized its waterworks trustees — Henry Monning, Charles McCulloch and C. Boseker — to employ J. D. Cook of Toledo to prepare plans; Cook's reservoir plan, which the council itself did not favor, was put to the people and carried, 2,593 to 591. Ground was broken in the fall of 1880. The works, exclusive of the reservoir, cost $236,865; the reservoir followed at $20,000.

Pumping Station No. 1: The council's third faction had its way on the source: the city built its first pumping station on Spy Run creek, near Clinton street, with a low-pressure engine capable of pumping 3,000,000 gallons a day, a high-pressure engine and a battery of boilers — "a first-class pumping plant." The supply soon proved inadequate: in the first summer's drought the city had to tap the feeder canal and use its impure water after all. About twenty miles of pipe were laid at the beginning. By the time Griswold wrote in 1917, all the city's water was drawn from deep rock wells, through three widely separated pumping stations — and the fire department fought with hydrant pressure instead of canal hose and cistern buckets.

Street lighting: The streets were lit first by gas. The Fort Wayne Gas Light Company was incorporated on 6 March 1855, with a plant at the junction of Barr street and the canal; service at first was for interiors only, and after an election in 1857 the people authorized the council to let the company illuminate the streets with gas, the cost laid on property owners in proportion to their frontage. When the city contract ended in 1873, the Globe Gas Light Company lit the streets with kerosene lamps for two years, after which the Fort Wayne company took a five-year contract again. In 1881 James A. Jenney brought his arc-lighting outfit to Fort Wayne: after a private test, a public demonstration drew more than two thousand people to look for the first time on an electric arc lamp; the first incandescent lamps for interior lighting were installed by McDonald and Olds in the Home billiard hall, and the first temporary private lighting plant — four lights driven by a traction engine — was set up in Library hall at Calhoun and Lewis. The gas company's own end came with natural gas in 1886, whose boom is told in the Business section.

Sources:

1. Griswold, Pictorial History (1917), Ch. XXV, "The Early Water Supply" (the canal hose lines and the thirty-four cisterns); Ch. XLIII (the Lane and Cook plans, the 1879 vote, the costs, Pumping Station No. 1, the first electric lights); and the gas company passage of Ch. XXXIV (the 1855 incorporation, the 1857 street-lighting vote, the Globe kerosene years).
2. Allen County Public Library, The Gilded Age in Fort Wayne, 1870–1900 (Fort Wayne, 1955) — the canal and the thirty-four cisterns before 1879.
3. City of Fort Wayne, Fort Wayne Fire Department "About Us" page (cityoffortwayne.in.gov), read November 2026 — the modern department behind the cross-reference above: 18 stations, 349 sworn firefighters, 110.5 square miles, an ISO rating of 2.