Michael Rawson

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Michael Rawson | The Nature of Water: Reform and the Antebellum Crusade for Municipal Water in Boston | Environmental History, 9.3 | The History Cooperative

The Nature of Water: Reform and the Antebellum Crusade for Municipal Water in Boston

ON A PERFECT fall day in October 1848, thousands of people from all over New England gathered in Boston to celebrate the completion of the city's first municipal water system and the arrival of a pure supply of water for drinking, bathing, cooking, and cleaning. Crowds lined the narrow streets for over two hours and watched a massive parade wind its way through a sea of decorations that proclaimed the coming of water. Spanning Tremont Street was a specially constructed arch inscribed with William Shakespeare's words, "There will be a world of water shed"; the Reverend Francis Parkman's church displayed a flag declaring "Pure Water the Gift of Heaven"; and dignitaries spoke from a stand festooned with biblical passages, one of which drew on Genesis to assure the crowd that "The water is ours." This last quotation captured one of the principal reasons that so many people had turned out to celebrate: The new system was publicly owned.¹

The crowd celebrated not just the fact of public ownership, however, but the victory of a set of complex and competing ideas about nature that adhered to public water. The city's working classes, which drew water from publicly available if often polluted wells, experienced water as a common resource to which all citizens had a right. A public system, they hoped, would operate like a commons and charge little or nothing for water. Urban reformers also supported a municipal system, although they viewed water differently. Provoked by rising levels of social disorder and inspired by a deep belief in nature as a force for good, reformers claimed that an abundant and inexpensive supply of water would transform the health and morality of the city's working classes. In contrast, a number of wealthy Bostonians had fought fiercely against public water. They saw pure water as a commodity that should remain available only to those who could afford the purchase price, and they feared that insulating it from market forces would threaten the economic system. But the ideas of this last group had not prevailed. Reformers, with their faith in environmental salvation, and the city's workers, with their vision of water as a commons, had lobbied successfully for a municipal system that would distribute water broadly and cheaply. This celebration belonged to them.²

Figure 1. Boston Water Celebration.
Uniformed members of a temperance society march in the water parade and carry a standard bearing the image of a fountain. The arch displays a quote from Shakespeare: "There will be a world of water shed."

Lithograph, 1848. Courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum.

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