Notable New Orleanians: A Tricentennial Tribute

contributed a chapter on African-American women during World War I to (Emmett Jay) Scott’s Official
History of the American Negro in the World War.
Alice Dunbar-Nelson, with mother and sister, left New Orleans in 1897 and was soon teaching in
New York. Seeing her picture published with a poem in the Boston Monthly Review, well-regarded
African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar began corresponding. They married in 1898. Their difficult
union ended in 1902 with a legal separation. He died in 1906. She would marry twice more (the
third time happily) and continue living on the East Coast, in Delaware and Pennsylvania, until her
death in 1935. Selected writings are available at www.Gutenberg.org and https//www.poetryfoundation.org
(accessed August 5, 2017).
—Carolyn G. Kolb
A LBERT B ALDWIN W OOD
(1879-1956)
Engineer and inventor Albert Baldwin Wood contributed the most ongoing good to the greatest
number of citizens in the history of New Orleans. His invention—and subsequent donation to the
city—of his three Wood Screw Pumps, has drained the city during rainstorms and floods for over a
century, while pumping out the sewage. Wood’s “low lift pump,” and his “Wood Centrifugal pump,”
not only clear the city of standing water, but preclude the many consequences of water on a land that
will not naturally drain. Wood’s pumps in fact have made great swaths of the city inhabitable, allowing
tens of thousands of middle class folk to build or reside in more affordable housing. Their importance
to New Orleans can hardly be overstated, as demonstrated in August 2017, when power failures and
an apparent lack of planning left important pumps
inoperable during an extraordinary rainstorm.
In 1899, fate placed Wood where his inventions
would do the most good, as engineer of the
newly-created Sewerage and Water Board of New
Orleans. His low-lift pump facilitated the movement
of water through the underground canals of
the city to its pumping stations. There the “Screw
Pump” lifted water almost effortlessly ten feet up
to sea level, actually the level of Lake
Pontchartrain. Meanwhile, Wood’s Centrifugal
Pump pushed water and sewerage into the new
sewerage system, using a pump with added vanes
that blocked large items from lodging in the
works and blocking their action. Between 1899
and 1934, the Baldwin Wood pumping system
enabled the city to double the number of residential
premises from 67,000 to 125,000, increasing
drained acres from 13,000 to 50,000. 1 As biographer
R. H. Thompson has written, within Wood’s adult lifetime New Orleans was transformed from
a dirty, swampy, pestilential city (1897) to “the most perfectly drained and healthiest in the U. S.” 2
Wood attended Tulane University during the 1890s graduating from its School of Engineering in
1899. His class was extraordinary, including lawyer and notary Percival Stern, industrialist Ernest
Lee Jahncke, and the brilliant jurist J. Blanc Monroe. A few months after his graduation Wood joined
the city’s new Drainage Commission, soon to be the Sewerage and Water Board, remaining at the
agency until his death fifty seven years later. For much of that time Wood’s salary was $5,000 a year.
Above: Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson.
FROM DUNBAR-NELSON, ALICE, THE DUNBAR SPEAKER
AND ENTERTAINER, NAPIERVILLE, ILL.: J. L. NICHOLLS &
CO., 1920.
Bottom: Albert Baldwin Wood.
COURTESY OF THE NEW ORLEANS SEWERAGE AND
WATEER BOARD.
BIOGRAPHIES
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