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Chapter 4 The Quest For Better Water Now that Hartford finally had a water works in place, the business of selling the Connecticut River water to the public became the raison d’etre of those who had championed the cause. Between October 23, 1855, when the water first flowed into the Lord’s Hill Reservoir, and the beginning of December, when the ground was too frozen to install connections to homes and businesses, 154 service pipes were laid, giving the water department a grand total of about 200 customers. Putting this progress into perspective, Hiram Bissell noted in his annual report that the work “. . . gives general satisfaction.” While Bissell and his board busied themselves with the housekeeping chores of the water department and the Whigs plotted feverishly to kill it, the city changed little, except in population. While the decade before 1850 saw an increase in the city’s residents of only 6 percent, in the decade immediately following mid-century, people—particularly the Irish—poured into the city, more than doubling the population to almost 30,000 souls. It was the only decade in Hartford’s history—before or since—that the population more than doubled. The two biggest facilitators of this explosive growth were the railroad, which allowed men and their families to quickly flock to a city with good-paying jobs and unchecked immigration. This congestion did not go unnoticed as the newspapers reported— Few cities in the United States are so densely populated as Hartford, where the number of inhabitants is greater in proportion to the space occupied by the old city limits than in any other city in the country, except the three or four principal ones. . . . We have been informed of one house in the Sixth Ward where there were, at one time, no fewer than eighteen families and forty children! Not surprisingly, there was a backlash to this wild expansion of the immigrant classes and the Know-Nothing party grew rapidly. This strange political party with its secret handshake and the “Have you seen Sam?” question, asking for the location of the next meeting, accounted for 75 of the 234 members of the U.S. House of Representatives and 11 of the 62 members of the U. S. Senate. In Connecticut—and in other Northeastern states packed with famine Irish—fears of the invading illiterates ran high, causing the ranks of KnowNothings to reach a high water mark in the late 1850s. Contributing to the decline of the Know-Nothing movement was the country’s complete absorption with the issue of Southern secession and a reduction in Irish immigration during the years of the American Civil War. Times were marginally better in Ireland in the years after the potato famine of 64 1845-1851 and, quite naturally, the possibility of being forced to fight in America’s domestic conflict was a great disincentive to emigration. For Hartford’s residents, the winter of 1855-1856—aside from the political tensions—was a time of bitter cold weather and lavish balls and other entertainments. The thermometer dipped below zero a total of forty-seven days and the ice on the Connecticut River could be transversed on foot until the first of April, but people were happily distracted by the relentless social whirl. For years, the Firemen’s Balls—which were one of the liveliest gatherings in town—were thrown to finance new equipment and this year it was the Neptune Company’s turn to host the event. Dr. Wyatt’s Lyceum and Lanergan’s City Theater vied for Hartford’s entertainment dollar along with the traditional homes of the lecture circuit—the Arts Hall and Union Hall. For the men, racing their trotters on the ice of the Connecticut River in wintertime was a raucous pastime with the racecourse typically a straight run from a mile downriver up to the covered bridge and a $30 prize for the winner. It was generally believed that “. . . the ice makes a great trotting track.” Sleighs were the preferred form of private transportation in the cold months, and young people skated on the Little and the Connecticut Rivers in great numbers. One of Hiram Bissell’s little annoyances was that, mixed in with the more practical customers of the water works, there were those who viewed the whole venture as a new toy. While he and his board wrestled with a Pandora’s box of unforeseen problems, the council decided that a fountain on the lawn of the statehouse...

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