Waco City Waterworks

What the plaque leaves out is how the water was treated. In 1914 a coal-fired steam boiler powered two giant pumps that drew Brazos River water into filtering tanks, where lime and iron removed impurities. A trade journal that year called the treatment first-class and up-to-date, and the city paid for it with a $400,000 bond. Chunks of concrete fell from the tall smokestack around 2006 and again in 2015, and the city proposed rebuilding its top twenty feet. Brazos River Authority material says wells supplied most residents until Lake Waco.

What the plaque says

Waco City Waterworks In 1849 Waco's main street was platted near one of a number of large natural artesian springs indigenous to this area. In the last quarter of the 19th Century Waco relied on private suppliers of artesian well water for its municipal needs. These supplies eventually proved inadequate and in 1901 the city approved bonds for a new waterworks system. By 1914 Waco had switched to water from the Brazos River and a distribution system powered by two steam-driven Allis-Chalmers pumps housed here in its newly completed waterworks complex. The pumps operated until 1967. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Waco Suspension Bridge — 0.9 mi
  A Brazos crossing opened in January 1870 as the longest single-span suspension bridge west of the Mississippi, tolled until 1889, closed to vehicles in 1971 and now walked.
• Dr Pepper Museum — 1.1 mi
  The 1906 bottling plant of the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company, built where Dr Pepper outgrew a Waco drugstore soda fountain, now the Dr Pepper Museum.
• Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum — 1.5 mi
  The official state repository of Texas Ranger memorabilia, opened in 1968 in Fort Fisher Park on the Brazos, named for a Ranger post of 1837 whose site no one has located.
• Armstrong Browning Library — 2.0 mi
  A three-story Italian Renaissance library on the Baylor campus built to hold A. J. Armstrong's Browning collection, dedicated in December 1951 and now, by its own account, the world's largest of Browning material.

More markers nearby

• Mount Zion United Methodist Church — 0.2 mi
• Site of Waco Indian Village — 0.6 mi
• Proctor Springs — 0.7 mi
• Grand Lodge of Texas, A.F. & A.M. — 0.8 mi