Documentary History of American Water-works

West Hartford

West Hartford, Connecticut

West Hartford was incorporated as a town in 1854.

The City of Hartford desired to build a reservoir on Trout Brook in the town of West Hartford to supply its water. The town of West Hartford resisted, but agreed to allow the reservoir to be built if the City of Hartford would supply water to West Hartford on the same terms as customers in the City of Hartford.

Water from the reservoir was first delivered in January, 1867 through an aqueduct that ran through the main street of West Hartford.

The town began taking water and sewer service under a contract with the Metropolitan District in 1935, but did not become a member until January 1, 1984.

Water is provided by The Metropolitan District.

References
1865 Amending the Charter of the City of Hartford and Providing for an Additional Supply of Pure and Wholesome Water. July 21, 1865.

1913 An act concerning a supply of water within the town of West Hartford. March 13, 1913.

1954 The West Hartford Story, by Richard N. Boulton and Bice Clemow
Pages 92-93: For those who found their enjoyment in nature, rather than in menageries or meetings, the hills along the Town's western border offered solace and contentment. Usually a haven of quiet, the mountain slope on one tragic occasion held the threat of near disaster for the farmers who lived below it.
At two o'clock in the afternoon of January 2, 1867, Hartford's pumps that had long taken river water from a well, 140 feet from the Connecticut River, "were put to sleep" and Reservoir No. 1 of the new Metropolitan District was opened. Scoffers had enjoyed a field day when it was announced that little old Trout Brook would be dammed up to supply not only West Hartford, but even Hartford itself with water. One even wrote a poem to the Hartford paper that sang:

I am Trout Brook! But where you look
   You look for a river in vain,
For there is no water within a mile and a quartet
   Unless it happens to rain!

I am only led by a water-shed
   And my very name is a sham.
So that, to my scandal, both sides make a handle
   Of the devil's device and cry – Dam!

But even the scoffers were impressed when that very fall, the millions of gallons of water trapped by the great earthen dam, broke through and came crashing through the Town, almost taking the Town with it. On September 6, 1867, rain poured in torrents for four solid hours. As the water poured into No. 1 Reservoir, alarmed farmers noticed that the seepage under the new dam was flowing harder. Before midnight, flood-gates were hastily opened to relieve the pressure of thirty-two acres of water on the fifty-three foot dam that was eight hundred feet long. But the leaks grew.
At ten the following morning, with the "rumble of an earthquake", the base of the dam gave way. The top crumbled in with a 125-foot breach. A gigantic wall of water crushed down the hillside and across the valleys "like the mighty waves of a storm-swept ocean." Great elms and maples, centuries old, disappeared. Stanley's dam and saw mill, near where Albany Place is today, was flicked off the landscape. George Brace's out-buildings were carried away. Edwin Belden's farm was buried under a foot of gravel, stone and sand. Fences vanished. Corn fields were uprooted and blanketed in ruin. Five cows grazing peacefully on John Griswold's farm were swirled miles down the course of Trout Brook and deposited on high ground, a lifetime of swimming behind them.
It was as 1f the little brook had been driven to fury by the waggish insults about her ability to supply water. With a great wave she snapped off the bridge at Mountain Road, rushed on to carry away the spans at Fern Street and at North Main. The new $8,000.00 bridge at the Center was wrenched askew and had to be rebuilt. Every lowland along the brook became a wide lake, in a few disastrous minutes. For several days "you might have run steamboats from West Hartford to the sea," one on-the-scene reporter wrote. Luckily, no one was drowned.
The great flood was brief but convincing. Streams, their bridges gone, halted the people who flocked out from Hartford the next day to survey the scene. But the damage was quickly repaired. Hartford, which had barely finished spending $73,000 for the dam at Reservoir No. 1 appropriated more money to build a safe dam to replace the earth fill. The new dam was rip-rapped with rocks and gravel, the flood had scoured the old damsite clean down to bed-rock.
The Town was paid for its bridges, and the farmers got $17,000 in reparations. The critics who had argued that the reservoirs in West Hartford could not provide enough water, were silenced. The hard feelings that were created when some West Hartford farmers thought Hartford ought to provide them free water because the great pipes were buried under Farmington Avenue, were forgotten. The compromise was to supply West Hartford from the same source at the same price.
Today 36 million gallons run under the Town's main east-west arteries each day, the soft, pure drinking water which flows into homes in the metropolitan area. Reservoir No. 1, held safely behind the dam carefully constructed nearly 80 years ago, is still the beauty spot of older days. But the chain of six reservoirs that enhance the beauty of the hills bordering the Town, is now added to by water piped many miles from Nepaug in the hills of Northwestern Connecticut. The system has been a favorite picnic, hiking, driving and bridle area from the beginning. In the old days the trolley line to Unionville passed by, and many were the picnickers who got off with baskets, their ukeleles and mandolins. James Shephard, writing in the old Connecticut Magazine of January, 1896, reports it as "one of the most desirable outing spots in the State".
He called particular attention to Reservoir No. 3 "nestled under Cathedral Rock, and the great boulder near Reservoir No. 2 that points a long index finger from the midst of a 'beautiful little forest alcove'. All mountains drives are grand, one leading west of Reservoir No. 3 that is especially fine", he pointed out. But it is the lakes themselves, "five of the most beautiful mountain lakes that were ever clustered together", and surrounded by nineteen miles of public drives that evoked the greatest poetic flights by the mauve decade author. "Most men like water – to look at," he writes

2010 Water for Hartford: The Story of the Hartford Water Works and the Metropolitan District Commission by Kevin Murphy. | also here (subscription required) |
Page 98: In exchange for allowing the Hartford Water Works to build a reservoir and extend their aqueduct across the east-west axis of West Hartford - under the Farmington road - the water board agreed to supply homes and businesses "within a reasonable distance of the aqueduct." (This wording fomented an endless succession of court cases until the legislature amending the private act in 1913, thereafter requiring Hartford to supply the whole town of West Hartford. Under the original agreement though, while the Hartford Water Works might lay fifty feet of pipe to a new home in the city, they could conceivably be forced to run a water pipe ten times that length - or more - to a farm in West Hartford. The consumer would pay for the connection, but the process of costing out individual connections, each with special circumstances, was both burdensome and time-consuming.