Floods are bad but droughts are an evil, also, which a city has to forestall. How this has been done may be exemplified by the story of the city’s waterworks. As this has been recently told again by Mr. F. Clifford Smith, we shall largely follow his excellent resumé prepared for the City Council last year.
At the beginning of the present century, when Montreal was a town of about nine thousand inhabitants, who lived mainly within the old fortifications, or, in other words, within the area bounded by the sites of McGill Street, Fortification Lane, Berri Street and the St. Lawrence, the only means provided by the municipality for the supply of water consisted of public pumps at Place d’Armes, the Market Place (now Place Royale), Notre Dame Street near the Courthouse, St. Jean Baptiste near St. Paul Street, and a couple of other points. For the rest the citizens supplied themselves with water from private wells and cisterns, and by watering carts from the St. Lawrence, and the creeks, the principal of which was the Petite Rivière which ran where Craig Street now is. The pedding of water in big puncheons was a common and quaint custom of these early days. The water cart would be driven into the river and filled. The poor women washed their linen on the banks.
In 1800, after considerable talk about forming a waterworks, an act was passed incorporating Joseph Frobisher (one of the founders of the Northwest Trading Company and builder of Beaver Hall) and his associates[2] under the title of the Company of Proprietors of the Montreal Waterworks. The capital invested was £6,000 with power to increase to £48,000. An exclusive franchise was given for fifty years. The system decided upon was that of gravitation. Water was obtained from a pond in the rear of the present Cote des Neiges village, and was brought to the city through wooden pipes laid around the southern slope of the mountain, via Monklands and Cote St. Antoine Road, to cisterns which were placed one on the corner of Guy and Dorchester streets, and the other on Notre Dame Street, just west of Dalhousie Square.
The company’s trouble soon began. The supply, which was from a well, was most precarious, while the frequent bursting of the wooden pipes finally resulted in the enterprise becoming a failure.
In 1816, the waterworks, and unexpired franchise of thirty-five years, were offered for sale; and in the year 1819 they were purchased by a new company under the management of Mr. Thomas Porteous for £5,000. This company abandoned the gravitation supply from the spring and instituted a steam pumping plant, the engines, of course, being very primitive. The supply was got from the St. Lawrence in the near vicinity of the city. Instead of wooden pipes, four-inch iron pipes were substituted, and wooden cisterns were then erected on Notre Dame Street east of Bonsecours Street. The cisterns were found to be very weak and were finally replaced with other wooden cisterns, but they were lined with lead. The capacity of the cisterns was 240,000 gallons. The pumping engine was placed on the west corner of Water and Friponne streets. The amount expended by Mr. Porteous was about forty thousand[3] pounds. The four-inch pipes put down soon proved insufficient; other troubles ensuing, this company also sold out. The plant was advertised for sale and was bought in by Mr. J. Haynes for $60,000. Mr. Haynes quickly floated a new company which replaced the small pipes in the streets by pipes of ten inches diameter and installed a more powerful engine. In 1843 two engines were at work with a pumping capacity of 93,000 gallons. By this time there were laid in the streets fourteen miles of pipes.
In 1843 also the first agitation was started for the city to own the waterworks. It was kept up till 1845, when the municipality made an offer of £50,000 for the plant, which was accepted.
HISTORY UNDER CIVIC CONTROL
In 1847, two years after the civic authorities of Montreal had taken over the primitive plant, the water committee made a report to the city council suggesting that a premium be offered for the best plan to force water from the St. Lawrence into a reservoir on the mountain. The idea was to get water power from the Lachine Canal. The suggestion was deemed impracticable and not acted upon.
In the year 1849 the city constructed a reservoir on what now is St. Louis Square. Its height was 130 feet above the St. Lawrence and its cost was £3,000. By the year 1850 the corporation had laid nineteen miles of iron pipe and six miles of lead pipes. The reservoir had a capacity of 3,000,000 gallons.
In the year 1852, the year of the great fire when much of the waterworks system had been destroyed, the services of Mr. Thomas C. Keefer were procured by the city to draft a plan whereby the city could get an entirely new water supply. The plan he proposed was adopted and has practically been in operation up to the present, when it is being drastically changed. The system consisted in an open canal having the entrance about a mile and a half above the Lachine Rapids. The canal, or aqueduct, which was four and three-quarters miles long, ended at a building called the Wheel House. This building contained two vertical hydraulic wheels operating a set of six pumps having a capacity of 4,000,000 gallons a day. The water was raised through a main of twenty-four-inch diameter, and ended at a reservoir where the present McTavish reservoir stands. The construction of these works lasted until 1856 and cost $280,236.53. The elevation of the aqueduct was thirty-seven feet above the level of the harbour. The dimensions of the aqueduct were forty feet wide at the water surface and eight feet deep. The canal furnished more than sufficient power to develop 300 horsepower, and to raise 200 feet above the level of the water, in the harbor, 5,000,000 imperial gallons of water, being at the rate of forty imperial gallons per capita. The hydraulic motive power was utilized by two breast wheels working six pumps. The old works were, of course, abandoned, and the pumping engines and reservoir on Notre Dame Street, with their sites, were sold for the very modest sum of $23,320. The whole new system had been well devised and the supply of water, indeed, was sufficient for a population twice as large as it was then; but troubles soon cropped up. Owing to the blocking up of the ice in the aqueduct, the formation of frasil and the annoyance caused by the backing up of water in the Little St. Pierre River, the supply in winter frequently only averaged three million gallons. The channel of the Little River St. Pierre was deepened in 1857 and 1858, but not sufficiently to get rid of the back water in question. In the winter of 1863 a tailrace was cut to the river which greatly ameliorated conditions. In 1862 and 1863, owing to increased population and ice blocks at the entrance of the intake, again the supply of water became so uncertain that the ancient custom of supplying water in puncheons had to be resorted to. This state of things naturally caused a great deal of trouble and annoyance, to say nothing of the additional expense to the city. In 1866 the consumption had actually reached 5,000,000 gallons a day, with the result that the supply was once more quite inadequate. In this year the superintendent of the water department made a strong plea for the purchase of steam engines; he held it was the only way that the water famines, through which the city was passing, could be prevented. Had there been a sufficient head of water in the aqueduct to get enough power, the plea for steam would not have been made, owing to its very heavy cost.