McNeill St. Pump Station

A downtown fire in 1881 pushed Mayor Andrew Currie to seek pressurized water, and in 1886 Samuel R. Bullock won the franchise. The Shreveport Water Works Company opened within a year as a fire-fighting supply. Filters came in 1890, and in 1914 the plant became one of the first in the country to disinfect with liquid chlorine. Its water came from Cross Bayou, then from the Red River after 1911 and from Cross Lake once a pipeline opened in 1928. The city bought the company in 1917 and shut the plant in 1980; the museum opened in 2007.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shreveport Water Works Museum — steps away
  An 1887 brick pumping station on McNeill Street where Worthington steam pumps ran until 1980, now a free museum and a National Historic Landmark.
• Spring Street Museum — 0.6 mi
  An 1866 bank building downtown that also held a Freedman's Savings and Trust branch in 1870, now a free LSUS-run museum with a Victorian parlor and the original vault.
• Shreveport Municipal Auditorium — 0.7 mi
  The Art Deco hall of 1929 where the Louisiana Hayride went out over KWKH from 1948 to 1960 and where Elvis Presley first played Shreveport on October 16, 1954.
• Louisiana State Exhibit Museum — 3.0 mi
  A circular Art Deco museum of 1939 on the Shreveport fairgrounds, with a 1,000-year-old Caddo log boat, rotunda murals and dioramas of early Caddo Parish.

More markers nearby

• Confederate Navy Yard — 0.4 mi
• First Commercial Use of Natural Gas in Louisiana — 0.4 mi
• Holy Trinity Catholic Church — 0.5 mi
• Downtown YMCA — 0.5 mi