Water is essential to and for life."  That is a phrase taken from one of several essays by students published in the South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority’s 1998 annual report to interpret the theme: "Water: Past, Present and Future". Most of us take our abundant supply of drinking water for granted. Open a faucet and drinkable water flows out. If household plumbing is connected to a community water system, we give little thought to its purity for drinking or adequacy for all other domestic, business and industrial uses. Much of the world’s population isn’t so fortunate---in many places less than a quart, much of it undrinkable, is all that is available per person per day.

This is a brief history about the evolution of public drinking water in Connecticut; from early 19^th century community water systems to safe drinking water of the 20^th where source protection and the advancement of water treatment, through the first decade of the 21^st century, has been driven by public concerns for protection against disease and sickness. Today, about 85% of the state’s population is served by community water systems.

Development of Community Water Systems in Connecticut, 1850-1878.

A study of urban development in the 19^th century might have concluded that city dwellers’ need for good clean drinking water would have been the driving force behind governmental or private efforts to raise capital funds for building a water system to serve a municipality. While that may have been partially true the real force for development of community water systems in Connecticut towns and cities was fire. With a frequency that is unheard of today, fire destroyed whole blocks of buildings, disrupted commerce and claimed lives. Much of New York City burned in 1835 lighting up the night sky with an orange glow that could be seen as far away as New Haven. A massive fire in 1845 burned much of Bridgeport. Fires burned whole blocks of buildings in New Haven in the 1830’s, ‘40’s and ‘50’s. Without a community water system, fighting fire became a futile effort if the blaze could not be controlled in its earliest stage. Citizen bucket brigades and fire companies with manually operated pumping equipment fought fires with water drawn from the nearest source: a mill pond, a canal, a harbor (if the tide was in) or a cistern below a city street that collected storm water. Although city governments had been in place in several Connecticut towns since the 18^th century, the first significant community water systems did not appear until the 1850’s. New Britain, Hartford and Bridgeport in the early to mid 1850’s followed by New Haven in 1862, Middletown in 1866, and Waterbury in 1867 were among the first cities in the state to build community water systems. Although a charter to serve New Haven had been granted to the New Haven Water Company in 1849, a city with a population approaching 30,000, a community water system was not operational until January 1, 1862. In each of these cities the destruction of property by fire drove its leaders to call for public debt, an unpopular burden for taxpayers, or alternatively, for industrialists and others in the business community to supply capital for a privately-owned public water system. The question of public vs. investor ownership and operation of a community water system would become a contentious issue in several Connecticut cities.

Cities in Connecticut, as in all of New England, began as small 17^th and 18^th century communities clustered around a green while the majority of the state’s population lived on farms. Water for drinking, cooking and the occasional Saturday night bath was obtained from springs or dug wells located around the community. Many of the dug wells were privately owned near a residence or business establishment while others were public---situated at street intersections or on a town green. For the more affluent, water was purchased from vendors who went door to door selling their product from barrels mounted on horse-drawn wagons, some advertising their source of water. Public underground cisterns to collect storm water from city streets were also common---some had hand pumps that allowed citizens to draw water for domestic use. And located nearby was another pervasive structure, the outdoor privy. One out of four children died before reaching the age of five from dysentery, while water borne cholera and typhoid organisms took the lives of thousands of adults each year, mostly in larger cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore.

Railroads began to appear throughout the state in the 1840’s and 1850’s contributing to the astonishing growth of industry. As each community grew and the density of population increased, roads and streets were paved with brick or crushed stone to replace dirt roads and the deep, muddy ruts left by wagons following heavy rains or periods of winter thaw. Gaslights replaced oil lamps to illuminate public thoroughfares. Curiously---perhaps incomprehensible to us in the 21^st century, these improvements preceded the development of a public water system, often by several decades in some Connecticut communities. Why spend money on a drinking water system when a dug well would suffice? We should bear in mind that when the issue was submitted for a referendum only qualified males could vote while it was women and children who were responsible for bringing water into the house from a backyard well or a community well down the street.

Enteric diseases took a far greater toll of life than fire and would consume not only lives but also family spirit as children and loved ones were lost forever to surviving family members. Property losses from fire, not water borne diseases, eventually drove cost conscious New Englanders to consider developing the infrastructure for public water systems.

Developing a community water system was not an easy matter. Winning a charter from the state legislature that gave the municipality or private company the exclusive right to build dams and take water from streams or rivers and an exclusive right to serve the community was often controversial. As community leaders and entrepreneurs investigated new sources of water, arguments raged about the superior purity and adequacy of one source over another depending on which party stood to gain or lose from sale of land and water rights. Early water supply men grossly under-estimated the amount of water that would be needed to serve a community. Very few were engineers. The only institution offering engineer training at the time was the U. S. military academy. Most water supply men of the mid-19^th century had worked as surveyors or on construction crews building canals. And capital to build a municipal water system was hard to raise. Businessmen regarded water supply as an enterprise "most barren of revenue" a feature that discouraged private financing of community drinking water systems. Land had to be acquired and a dam and/or a pumping station constructed to draw water from the source. And more capital would be needed to lay water mains in streets to deliver water to consumers in the community. Politics and self-serving interests inevitably entered the picture. Each source that was promoted as the purest and most reliable by its advocates would also be denigrated by another faction advocating development of a source of supply at a different location. Private versus public investment in a municipal water system became an issue in New Haven. A city-wide referendum for the sale of bonds to finance the water system was approved in 1853, but was overturned on a technicality. A follow-up referendum, favoring opponents through a state legislative requirement, ended in defeat for proponents of a municipally financed and owned water system. Eli Whitney II, son of the famous inventor, eventually went on to build the dam for the reservoir named after him and New Haven’s first water system using private funds in 1859-1861. Advocates for private investment despised public debt because it would lead to higher taxes, pointing out that graft, corruption and favoritism by city bosses was sure to follow. Those in favor of a city-owned system would claim that water for public use and consumption, the essence of life, should not be left in the hands of a greedy, self-serving, profit oriented group of investors. The horrible example set by the initial private development and ownership of New York City’s water system in the late 18^th century by the Manhattan Company (a front for a predecessor of Chase bank) that clung to existence by the nature of its charter may well have discouraged and delayed development of water systems in Connecticut. Connecticut was fortunate in that neither politics nor private greed would deny eventual development of good community water systems.

The first significant community water systems in Connecticut weren’t developed until ten years after the initial New York City Croton system had been completed with public funds in 1842. Population growth, citizens demanding cleaner streets, and wasteful use stressed the early water systems. Paved streets, an improvement over their former unpaved state, were still dirty, dusty thoroughfares when there had been no rain, and the source of terribly offensive odors following rainfall and hot, humid weather. And the general public firmly believed that decaying vegetation and animal waste littering street gutters generated "miasma", the source of all summertime sickness. The public demanded that streets be frequently washed and kept clean.

Industry used large amounts of water for use in boilers for steam to power machinery, as did railroads. By the 1860’s indoor plumbing began to appear in households of the wealthy and later in multi-family tenement buildings as well as factories and other places of commerce. By the 1870’s the changing life-style lead to a drastic increase in water consumption. The indoor Water Closet was a great convenience but its earliest models wasted huge amounts of water because they allowed water to flow continuously. One of the great practical inventions, the wash-down closet (Americans called it the flush toilet) attributed to an Englishman, Thomas Crapper, solved the problem with a reservoir and valve system that released only enough water to flush the waste. The use of Crapper’s invention by industry, hotels and tenements was most likely spurred by city water departments such as Hartford’s, one of the earliest in the state to require water meters. Flush toilets eventually became an essential device for the growing numbers of middle class homes, tenements and factories. Industrial and residential water use, reflecting huge increases in population growth, fueled by European immigration, increased at an almost exponential rate during the latter 19^th and early 20^th century. Municipal and investor-owned water utilities were in desperate need of additional sources of water to satisfy demand of growing communities.

Growth of cities and the public concern for safe drinking water.

Public health would not become a major political issue until science would prove the germ theory. The connection of polluted wells with episodes of cholera and typhoid would be demonstrated in London in the 1850’s. Microscopic organisms or "animalculae", first observed in water with crude microscopes of the 17^th century weren’t connected with sickness and disease until the 1870’s. Following the development of relatively clean upland sources, public officials would note declines in sickness but attributed it to cleaner streets. So ingrained was miasma with sickness that no generally accepted connection was made linking sickness with micro-organisms in drinking water until the 1870’s. In 1878 the Connecticut State Board of Health was founded with power to oversee vital statistics and make investigations of outbreaks of disease. Soon after, laws were enacted and public health regulations adopted making it an offense to throw filth and trash into a public reservoir. By the 1890’s, the prevention of outbreaks of often fatal, water-borne disease would be high on the national and state public health agendas. Boiling water to assure its safety for drinking was being advocated by public health officials. But implementing laws and regulations would be problematic. Safeguarding the purity and adequacy of a drinking water supply in the late 19^th through mid 20^th century could only be accomplished by acquiring land. At the time, property rights trumped land use regulation, even when public health, safety and welfare were at stake.

The development of Hartford’s water system is a good example of the search for purity and adequacy of public drinking water. Hartford had developed a large pumping station to take water from the Connecticut River in 1855. For a time, water taken from the Connecticut River was a palatable supply. But a small tributary stream that discharged near the pumping station intake had become badly polluted with human and animal wastes. Water drawn from the Connecticut River began to take on a terrible odor and cloudy appearance and had a taste to match. By 1867, after a lengthy ordeal with politicians and landowners opposed to developing an upland supply in towns outside of Hartford, the City completed the first of its reservoirs in the town of West Hartford on the Trout Brook watershed. Accolades for the improved quality of water from the small, upland 167 million gallon reservoir were short-lived, because the reservoir would be empty by late summer. The City’s water department had no choice but to resume drawing water from the Connecticut River to supplement its supply by late summer and fall in the prolonged drought of the 1870’s. Epidemics of typhoid fever followed, reinforcing growing consumer awareness that drinking polluted river water lead to sickness. Developing additional upland reservoirs became an urgent matter. The drought spurred development of additional reservoirs in West Hartford requiring acquisition of more land and downstream water rights.

Eventually, Connecticut law would prohibit the use of any stream or other body of water that received the discharge of sewage or wastewater, even though it might be treated. Likewise, cities and towns were prohibited from discharging public sewers into a watercourse that drained to a public water supply reservoir, a feature that is unique to this state and Rhode Island. Charters had been granted by the legislature allowing municipal water commissions and investor-owned water utilities to take water from specific streams and watersheds for the development of additional sources of supply---granting them powers of eminent domain to take land for reservoirs and related facilities.

Adequacy, purity and economy were the fundamental criteria for developing additional sources of water for Connecticut’s growing cities, water systems that have endured to this day. Dams and tunnels had to be built bringing water from a more distant upland supply. Although dams, tunnels and conduits brought water by gravity at considerable initial cost, pumping stations were costly to operate and maintain and were less reliable. Land for an upland gravity supply, by contrast, was cheap, even by standards of the day, because rural populations were moving off the land and abandoning farmland to find jobs in cities. However, in the early years (1850’s-1880’s) only enough land and land rights would be purchased for construction of a dam and flooding of the basin behind the dam, but very little for protection of water purity.

Water use, much of it through wasteful practice, would more than double in the late 1890’s and early 1900’s forcing municipal and private water companies to continue searching for sites to build larger reservoirs. The relatively small reservoirs constructed during the 1850’s and 1860’s were inadequate and could not supply enough water to satisfy manufacturer’s and residential household’s thirst for water.

1880-1895, the quest for pure water

Virtually all of the land draining to newly created reservoirs of the mid to late 19^th century was privately owned, most of it farmed or recently abandoned farmland. There were no state forests, state parks or land trust holdings to protect the watersheds. With the exception of land held by a few hunting and fishing clubs, there was no movement to protect forests and wetlands to protect a public drinking water supply. Meanwhile the Connecticut landscape was undergoing change. Forests, which had been virtually eliminated, down to less than 15% of the area of the state in 1840, were now making a comeback. There were coppiced woodlots on ridges and wetlands, hay lots, orchards and abandoned fields reverting to forest growth. Although more forest covered the state, farmhouses, barns, barnyards, chicken coops, pigpens and outhouses still dotted the rural landscape. Dirt roads and lanes, some on steep grades would frequently cross water courses. Sawmills, gristmills and cider mills could be found along larger streams and rivers on the watersheds together with workmen’s privies. Heavy rainfall or melting snow would send torrents of muddy water down the dirt roads eventually washing everything it could carry into a reservoir. Water drawn from a reservoir into a municipality’s network of mains with a cloudy appearance drove consumers to use water from wells and springs that had previously been condemned by health officials.

State health officials, backed by the newly emerging science of bacteriology, began to understand the relationship among microorganisms in drinking water, human illness and land use. They demanded that water utilities do a better job of protecting their water resources. Eventually, municipal and investor owned water utilities would be pressured to purchase more land for the protection of water sources. Several severe outbreaks of water-borne illness spurred municipal and investor-owned water utilities to control land use by purchasing more land on the watershed above a reservoir. Water coming out of a consumer’s tap could be as pure or distressingly turbid as the water in the reservoir.

Water utilities (municipal and private) began to view agriculture on the watersheds, especially barnyards, hog pens, farmhouses and outhouses as incompatible with a pure water supply; also upstream factory mills with outdoor toilet facilities located close to the watercourse were placed under close scrutiny. "Closets" as they were called, were cited in newspaper stories as sources of potential contamination for a public drinking water reservoir. Because very few public water systems had filtration plants at the turn of the 19^th/20^th century there would be outbreaks of disease, such as a typhoid outbreak in New Haven causing the death of at least 50 people and sickening hundreds more in April 1901. The outbreak was traced to a farm in Woodbridge on the watershed of Lake Dawson reservoir where family members were known typhoid carriers. A law passed later that year empowered investor and municipally owned water utilities to inspect private property on the watersheds for conditions that might be a source of contamination and a threat to public health and report back to public health officials for enforcement action. The New Haven Water Company hired its first sanitary inspector following the April 1901 outbreak and the legislation that authorized inspections of private property.

The Multiple Barrier approach for protecting drinking water

Most public and investor-owned water utilities, had charter rights to take land and water rights for reservoir sites and other facilities, but not expressly for protection of water quality. Regulation of a landowner’s property rights to control land use was an unfamiliar---almost unheard of concept---in an era when private property rights of rural landowners trumped the urban public consumer’s need for clean, safe drinking water. Overcoming this conflict, beginning as early as 1895, investor and municipally owned water utilities in the state began purchasing thousands of acres of farmland and cutover woodlots on watersheds draining to their reservoirs.

Initially, buying watershed land and terminating farming and habitation as a use of the land was the only effective way to control its use and protect reservoirs from contaminated runoff. The old Hartford Water Commission considered using "bleaching powder" should drought force it to resume pumping from the Connecticut River. New Haven Water Company had completed building a slow sand gravity filtration plant in 1906 in Hamden. Other communities around the country already had such treatment plants. In Kentucky, rapid sand or mechanical filtration had been used to treat water taken from polluted rivers, but without the benefit of chlorination.

While most of the nation outside New England began to build filtration plants for purifying water taken from large rivers and the Great Lakes, New England and notably, Connecticut, had constructed only a few. The use of chlorine as a disinfectant would not come into general use until after 1911. Without chlorination there continued to be serious incidents of sickness and disease linked to breakdowns in the filtration process. New England drinking water systems, especially following chlorination, easily met the first federal drinking water standards of 1914, and revisions of the standards in 1925, 1942, 1946 and 1962.

The first federal water quality standards in 1914 applied only to bacteria in drinking water and were legally binding on water utilities that supplied interstate carriers. Most Connecticut cities were served by the New York, New Haven and Hartford R.R. The bacteria standard forced water utilities to use chlorine, dissolved either as a gas or as a powder to disinfect public drinking water.

Chlorination emerged as the method of choice to insure that tap water would be safe to drink. It was an additional barrier against bacteria and some, but not all, micro-organisms that might be found in the relatively pure water drawn from clean and secure forested watersheds. The use of chlorine to disinfect drinking water as it entered the distribution system drastically reduced the incidence of typhoid and bacteria-related sickness. With just a few exceptions, chlorination allowed many water utilities in the state to avoid building filtration plants and the large capital and operating expense associated with their construction. But that would change.

Forces of Change

Connecticut’s population continued to move off farms and into cities until shortly after the Second World War. Following the war, the landscape of Connecticut once again began to change. Returning veterans opted to move to tracts of single family housing being developed in rural towns adjoining the larger cities of the state. Some of the housing tracts were on watersheds of reservoirs supplying public drinking water. By the 1960’s, more families chose to move farther out in the countryside leaving older suburbs. Not only was the landscape undergoing change, but so was the quality of water runoff as land was being converted from forest and old fields to residential subdivisions, strip malls and highways. Water quality in reservoirs began to decline, especially on watersheds where most of the land was in private ownership. And following World War II, hundreds of new chemical pesticides were being manufactured for use on farms, lawns and around buildings to eliminate insect pests, rodents, and other critters. Heavy applications of fertilizer produced bigger crops and greener lawns while liberal application of pesticides held off grubs, beetles and other insects. Some of the fertilizer and pesticides, carried off the land by increasing amounts of pavement and other impervious surfaces, would find its way into reservoirs---increasing the growth of algae in water. However, on well-protected watersheds, much of the drinking water continued to meet water quality standards without filtration. The 1962 revision of the federal drinking water standards were far more comprehensive and was an early warning to operators of drinking water systems; more attention must be given to water quality. Hartford MDC constructed a complete conventional filtration plant in West Hartford at Reservoir 6 in the early 1960’s. Earlier, the old Hartford water commission had built a slow-sand gravity filter plant for the reservoirs on the Trout Brook watershed. And in 1972 New Haven Water Company began construction of a filter plant for its Lake Saltonstall supply.

Increasing federal concern about the safety of drinking water in the U S resulted in a survey of a large number of water systems in the late 1960’s and early ‘70’s, about the time that the US Environmental Protection Agency came into existence. The survey disclosed that many larger systems outside Connecticut were not providing safe drinking water to consumers, especially for young children. Some community water systems were deemed unsafe for any person to drink, especially systems that drew water from large rivers receiving discharges from upstream chemical plants. New chemicals were being manufactured in increasing amounts and at a rate that alarmed health officials before their health effects could be evaluated if they should be found in community drinking water. Congress, in 1974, reacted by passing the Safe Drinking Water Act. The Act raised water quality standards to a level that would be difficult to meet, regardless of the pristine nature of the source water, without further purification.

As public drinking water came under closer scrutiny, it was apparent to water supply professionals that, without filtration, even a well-protected watershed with just simple chlorination would no longer meet the new standards as they applied to the physical, chemical, radiological and biological constituents of drinking water. It posed a dilemma for smaller systems and larger, investor owned water utilities. Filtration of small reservoirs, usually serving just a few hundred residential and business/commercial taps, could not be economically justified, especially in an era when water rates were low. Small reservoirs were abandoned in favor of new wells. But the quality of water drawn from wells was also circumspect; some products such as dry-cleaning agents, degreasing compounds, gasoline and other petroleum products from leaking tanks together with chemicals applied for control of microbes harmful to agriculture would find their way into groundwater resources used to supply a community drinking water system. The New Haven Water Company, a large investor-owned water utility in the state that owned over 25,000 acres land, proposed selling off 16,500 acres in 1974 to finance construction of filtration plants that would be needed on two of its largest reservoirs. The announcement created a firestorm of controversy that lead to the creation of the South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority, an entity with governmental powers that eventually acquired the Company in 1980 after protracted negotiations.

To implement the new federal water quality standards in Connecticut, the state department of public health water supply section won primacy, meaning that the US EPA recognized that it was appropriately staffed and qualified, had adopted and could enforce regulations at least as stringent as those promulgated at the federal level.

Another issue that had to be addressed was the competence of community water system operators. Local zoning regulations had allowed many relatively small condominium-style residential communities to be developed beyond municipal water mains in the 1960’s and 1970’s. These small community systems were allowed to develop their own water supply, usually a single well to serve the community. Water quality was monitored infrequently, if at all, and the person in charge of the system who may have known something about plumbing and water pumps had little knowledge about water quality. For larger systems, running complex filtration and treatment apparatus could not be left to novices. It required specialized training in the operation of filtration plants, treatment technology and knowledge of water chemistry to name just a few of the disciplines. Other challenges faced operators of community drinking water systems. The most commonly used disinfectant, chlorine, continued to be applied in sufficient quantity to maintain a residual of protection against backflows of polluted water. Backflows might enter the system when there was a sudden drop in water pressure due to a main break or a pumping problem. As the chemistry of public drinking water came under closer scrutiny, scientists were finding complex compounds known as disinfection by-products when chlorine reacted with natural organic matter. In higher concentrations, disinfection by-products could be potentially carcinogenic.

By the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, AIDS and its precursor, HIV began to appear in the U. S. population. Persons afflicted with HIV, AIDS or who were undergoing chemotherapy for treatment of cancer would have low resistance to bacteria and viruses; and chlorine-resistant micro-organisms such as cryptosporidium and giardia that were turning up in public water systems across the country. As recently as the early 1990’s contaminated source water in Lake Michigan and inadequately trained public water system operators were cited as the cause of at least 100 deaths of people whose immune systems were compromised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Lead, mercury, chromium and other metals, if they were present in drinking water, were also the object of health official’s attention; heavy metals could impair mental development of children while arsenic in drinking water, in relatively small concentrations, could cause cancer.

By the mid-1980’s and continuing through to the present, amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act have continued to raise standards for water purity and have grown increasingly complex, demanding not just additional improvements in purification technology, but also a renewed effort to protect watersheds from the impacts of development. Connecticut water utilities responded: water purification plants have been constructed for all surface reservoirs supplying drinking water to Connecticut communities. One of the latest, a complex state-of-the art purification plant was completed in 2005 by the South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority for Lake Whitney in Hamden; it replaced the 1906 slow sand filtration plant. In 1996 the Regional Water Authority resumed purchasing land and conservation easements, often in partnership with towns and land trusts for protection of drinking water, now an on-going program.

Water quality must undergo comprehensive monitoring by larger community water systems, evaluated and reported to the State Health Department. Also, consumers who are provided drinking water by a community system must be kept informed with annual reports about the quality of their drinking water---not just a few general statements, but detailed accounts of what is in their drinking water and its relative concentration. Referred to as Consumer Confidence Reports, each customer on a community water system is entitled to receive one.

Another Challenge---

This is a small state, richly endowed with water resources. Water resources in Connecticut were once thought to be so abundant that loss of water from leaks and breaks in water mains, wasteful or inefficient use of water could be tolerated because additional reservoirs could be built or old ones enlarged, or new wells drilled to secure additional water for the system. That was then, but this now----population growth and demands by that population for more than just drinking water from the water resources of the state have forced a change in our approach to conserving these resources. No longer is it possible to build new reservoirs or drill new wells without having some impact on a downstream water resource that sustains an aquatic environment or that thousands might rely upon for recreation, drinking water or dilution of treated sanitary wastewater. The attack of September 11, 2001 made us aware of the vulnerability of our drinking water systems. The population of the state will always need a dependable supply of water safe for drinking, and an adequate supply for such household uses as flushing toilets, washing clothes and bathing, not to mention other public purposes such as firefighting. So the need to protect watersheds and maintain multiple barriers to keep water safe for drinking and an adequate supply for other uses will never leave us. A water supply professional’s work is not about sitting back and watching water run downhill after the reservoir, the pumping stations and water mains have been built. Water systems are dynamic; they age and must be constantly updated to protect against natural and man-made threats to the purity and adequacy of public drinking water. The water supply professional’s work today, more than ever, is about working with people and communities: keeping them informed to safeguard the existing resource, to renew, rebuild and operate water systems using the latest and best that technology has to offer assuring that the water consumed by the public, meets the standard set by public regulation.

General References

Atwater, Edward E. History of the City of New Haven to the Present Time. W. W. Munsell Co. 1887. New Haven Public Library Community History Room.

Bennitt, Claire C. and McCluskey, Dorothy S. Who Wants To Buy A Water Company? From Private to Public Control in New Haven. Rutledge Books, Bethel CT. 1996.

Blake, Nelson M. Water for the Cities, A History of the Urban Water Supply Problem in the United States. Syracuse University Press. 1956.

Bridgeport Hydraulic Company. 125^th Anniversary of the Bridgeport Hydraulic Company. 1982.

Bunch, Bryan w/Hellemans, Alexander. The History of Science and Technology. Houghton Mifflin Company. 2004.

Fair Haven Water Company. Annual Report to Stockholders, 1867. South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority.

James, Daniel. A Hundred Years of HFA; The story of Hammonasset Fishing Association. Meriden-Stinehour Press. 1988.

Koeppel, Gerard T. Water for Gotham-A History. Princeton University Press. 2000.

Lambton, Lucinda. Temples of Convenience and Chambers of Delight. Pavilion Books Ltd., London. Paperback, 1997.

Murphy, Kevin J. Water for Hartford. Shining Tramp Press. 2004.

Melosi, Martin V. Garbage in the Cities. Refuse, Reform and the Environment 1880-1980. The Dorsey Press, Chicago. 1981.

New Haven Water Company. Minute Books of the Board of Directors’ Meetings, 1849-1979. South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority.

New Haven Water Company. First Annual Report of the Board of Directors to

Stockholders, 12 February 1863. South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority.

New Haven Water Company. Second through Twelfth annual reports of the Board of

Directors to Stockholders, reprinted 1875. South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority.

Oscherwitz, Jan C. "The History of the New Haven Water Company – Redefining Public Need." Senior Essay, Department of History, Yale University, 1984. South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority.

Reyburn, Wallace. Flushed with Pride; the story of Thomas Crapper. Pavilion Books Ltd. London. 1989.

Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. Ed. The Almanac of American History. Barnes & Noble Books, New York. 1993.

Schaefer, Otto E. "LifeStream for a Region". Unpublished manuscript, a history of New Haven Water Company and the South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority, 1849-2003 (completed thru 1994).

Unlisted references. Journal of American Water Works Association. 1980’s thru 2006.