LAWRENCE — A bright-green local relic with a powerful story to tell about the city and state’s historic role advancing public health has rested largely out of public view for well over a century.
The sturdy, 12-foot-long scale model, constructed in 1893, illustrates the lifesaving lab investigations and slow-sand filtration method of purifying fouled Merrimack River drinking water.
The investigations and engineering were developed at the Lawrence Experiment Station (founded in 1887), and the filtration put into service in 1893 after a typhoid fever outbreak in Lawrence and Lowell killed more than 200 people in the fall of 1890 and winter of 1891, according to archival Eagle-Tribune and state Department of Environmental Protection accounts.
Lawrence became the first city in the nation to filter its drinking water for disease prevention, and the model became an emissary of sorts spreading word of the vital innovations.
The model was showcased and awarded a medal at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair, attended by some 25 million visitors.
The model was then returned to the Lawrence Experiment Station and for some of the next 133 years kept in storage. It suffered dings and a mysterious burn patch — but never was entirely forgotten.
Each lab director has told the successor to safeguard the piece of history, station Director Parinya Panuwet says.
“I arrived here last year,” Panuwet said, “and Dr. Oscar Pancorbo (the previous director) told me the same thing.”
Panuwet had the model displayed in a well-lit nook in the inner lobby of the Sen. William X. Wall Experiment Station, 37 Shattuck St., run by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection.
At least here, in plain sight, employees can recognize that the research, testing and other work they do today safeguarding drinking water for Massachusetts residents has a direct connection to the local beginnings of water purification and public health, Panuwet said.
The DEP is in the early stages of efforts to preserve and repair the artifact.
James Beauchesne, the Lawrence Heritage State Park visitor center’s supervisor for 23 years before retiring in July 2021, was intrigued by the model when he saw it in a storage closet some 15 years ago on a visit to the experiment station.
For Beauchesne, who grew up in the city, and other Lawrencians including Amita Kiley, research coordinator of the Lawrence History Center, the local connections to groundbreaking advances in safe drinking water are a huge point of pride.
“I wish it was even more well known,” Kiley said of the local connections to public health. “I wish it was as well known as the (Great Textile) strike in Lawrence.”
In 1975 the station was recognized as a national historic civil engineering landmark.
In 1987, when station employees celebrated the station’s 100th anniversary, a number of them posed for a photograph outside the station with a banner that read, “The birthplace of environmental research in America.”
It is considered, at least by some, to be the world’s first facility dedicated to testing and developing modern methods of drinking water purification and sewage treatment.
The experiment station has been on Shattuck Street, in view of the Merrimack River and its Great Stone Dam, since it relocated there in 1954 from its original spot along the river near Island Street.
Thousands of scientists and engineers have visited the Lawrence Experiment Station since 1893.
They have come, and continue to arrive, in the wake of its water treatment breakthroughs.
The state Board of Health established the Lawrence Experiment Station in 1887 under the direction of Hiram Mills, the Essex Company’s lead engineer.
Station researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under lead biologist William Thomas Sedgewick investigated waterborne diseases caused by bacteria, viruses and other organic matter from untreated sewage.
Ellen Swallow Richards – in 1873 MIT’s first female graduate – was a chemistry professor at the station.
She also carried out tests on water samples.
The findings at the station were put into practice at the city’s water treatment plant built upriver along Water Street near Ames Street.
The treatment plant expanded capacity and refined its methods over the years.
The Lawrence Flood of 1936 inundated the plant and led the city, with financial help from President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program, the Public Works Administration, to rebuild and modernize the treatment plant.
The old system channeled river water by way of gravity to five beds of sand, 4 feet thick.
The water seeped through the cleansing sand into a well. It was treated with chlorine and pumped to the city reservoir at Tower Hill, then distributed through mains (big pipes) to Lawrence neighborhoods and businesses, according to Eagle-Tribune archives.
The new system pumped river water to mixing chambers where it was treated with chlorine, sent to coagulation basins where solids dropped out, then the water passed through sand and gravel filtration beds to remove bacteria before the water was aerated.
The water then passed through more sand filters and was given additional chlorine treatment.
The clean water was then pumped to the reservoir tower.
At the time Lawrence’s daily water use was about 4.5 million gallons. Today the city uses about 6 million gallons of drinking water daily.
The scale model of the original experiment station is a reminder of where the water purification work started and its importance to the present.
“We still ensure that people have safe drinking water for the state of Massachusetts,” the current station director said.