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North America’s First Aqueduct

Plymouth is well known as the first New England settlement, but there were other “firsts” which the town could be proud of as well. One was the aqueduct which was the first in English North America. It brought running water from near Deep Water Bridge (Billington Street) to the downtown area. The Plymouth Aqueduct was chartered in 1796 by Joshua Thomas and others. Boston’s Jamaica Pond Aqueduct Company was incorporated in 1795 but Davis notes that the Plymouth aqueduct was completed and in service before the Boston one, which, delayed by law suits &c., didn’t begin operations until 1803.

The Plymouth aqueduct was built by Caleb Leach of Bridgewater, who later left Plymouth in 1800 for similar work in New York. The pipes were seasoned yellow pine logs, 10  to 12 feet long and 10” in diameter with a bore of two to four inches. They were tapered at one end and reinforced with an iron hoop at the other. The tapered end of one log was pounded into the reinforced end of the previous log to make a firm connection. It cost five dollars a year to get water for a family, or eight dollars if there were two families in a house, during the months when there was no frost. This services was later replaced with iron pipe running water from the Lout Pond (“Patuxet Lake”) pumping station on Billington Street  in 1855, and pipes still take water along the south bank of Town Brook as they did in 1798. The Lout Pond station brought water from South Pond via Little South Pond.

The original pipe line apparently ran from Deep Water bridge along what is now Billington Street until it reached William Crombie’s water priviledge. There was some sort of mill building (visible in early images, as in W. H. Bartlett’s 1853 engraving and the 1890s photo) crossing the brook below where the Plymouth Mills Lower Works dam was, apparently built by Holmes & Packard in 1800 (and recently removed), about where the current foot bridge is now. It seems likely that this is where the pipe crossed, as the land on the north side of the brook begins to rise here, and the water needed a more level elevation if it were to flow by gravity, which was only practical on the south bank. It presumably returned to the north bank at Newfield Street, where the Brimmer iron factory was (now the Samuel Holmes Playground and skateboard park), as the pipe does today.

The sources are the standard Plymouth histories: James Thacher,  History of Plymouth, Massachusetts (1832), p. 319; William T. Davis. Ancient Landmarks of Plymouth (1883), p. 127; Davis, History of Plymouth (1885), pp. 95, 104; Davis, Memories of an Octogenarian (1907)