Drinking the St. Joseph: the water supply

1843 — TODAY

From the canal to the limestone plant at the confluence: For its first decades Fort Wayne drank from where it stood: the rivers themselves, the canal (a recorded supply from 1843 into the 1870s), ponds, creeks, cisterns, and wells. Typhoid and cholera made that arrangement a civic argument, and in 1875 the argument became an election: the owners of an old feeder canal offered to build a water system and sell the city its water, the council favored it, the voters did not, and, in Ryan Schnurr's account in In the Watershed, "the people voted out every candidate who favored the plan to buy water from the canal." The incoming council hired its own engineer. What followed was the first waterworks, built in 1880: steam pumps drawing on deep wells, and an open reservoir of five million gallons in a brick-lined hill at Reservoir Park — the man-made hill still in the park — at a cost of $250,000.

Wells sufficed for fifty years and then did not. Shortages in the late 1920s pushed the city back to a river — deliberately, to the right river. Plans were developed in 1930 under Mayor William Hosey; ground was broken in 1931; and in December 1933 the Three Rivers Water Filtration Plant was dedicated on a 25-acre tract east of Spy Run, at the confluence itself, a Collegiate Gothic landmark in Indiana limestone designed by Hoad, Decker, Shoecraft, and Drury of Ann Arbor. Its water does not come from the confluence, though. In conjunction with the plant, the city built the St. Joseph River Dam and pumping station across from Johnny Appleseed Park, near present Coliseum Boulevard, and laid two 42-inch mains down Parnell Avenue to carry raw St. Joseph water to the plant.

The engineers, Schnurr records, first looked at the Maumee and rejected it "given that most of the city's drainage, including raw sewage, went that way" — the clarity distinction between the parent rivers, made at the confluence entry above, written into infrastructure. Capacity grew with the city: 24 million gallons a day at opening, doubled in the 1950s — City Utilities dates the increase to 1954, the plant's compiled history gives the addition as 1955 — and raised to the present 72 million gallons a day in 1981. Behind the dam the city built itself depth: the Hurshtown Reservoir near Grabill in 1969, holding 1.8 billion gallons, and the Cedarville Reservoir and dam on Cedar Creek in 1979. The modern plant draws an average of about 36 million gallons a day from the St. Joseph, serves more than 300,000 people, and has been honored at the Berkeley Springs water tasting — the river the Miami named for beans, treated in limestone Gothic, is now the city's cup.

Sources:

1. City Utilities, Utility Advisory Group presentation (September 16, 2020) and annual water-quality reports — the 1933 completion, the St. Joseph source, and the 24 / 48 / 72 million-gallon capacity steps dated 1933, 1954, and 1981.
2. Allen County Genealogical Society, Three Rivers Water Filtration Plant page (drawing on the History Center and Randy Harter) — the canal-and-well era, the 1880 Reservoir Park works and its $250,000 cost, the 1930 planning under Mayor Hosey, the December 1933 dedication, the St. Joe Dam pumping station and 42-inch mains, Hurshtown (1969) and Cedarville (1979), and the 1955 dating of the first expansion.
3. Ryan Schnurr, In the Watershed: A Journey Down the Maumee River (Belt Publishing, 2017), introduction — the 1875 canal-water election and the engineers' rejection of the Maumee as a source.
4. The History Center, City Light ID tag record — the first sewer line of 1858 and the 1880 first waterworks drawing on deep wells.