Historic Philadelphia

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Above: Benjamin Latrobe (left) designed the
first waterworks with its Centre Square
pump and small reservoir. Frederick Graff
(right) became water works superintendent,
and expanded the intake system on
the Schuylkill.
COURTESY OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA, DEPARTMENT
OF RECORDS, CITY ARCHIVES.
Below: The Yearly Meeting of Friends in
1811 established an “Asylum for the Relief
of Persons deprived of the use of their
Reason.” The Quakers bought fifty-two
acres of farmland along the Tacony Creek, a
mile west of the twelve-hundred-person
town of Frankford, which had become a
borough of Philadelphia County in 1800. A
building was erected, and the first patient
arrived on May 20, 1817. It was the
nation’s first private mental hospital,
dedicated to “moral treatment” in an age
when patients were more often restrained
and abused. It still exists, modern and
expanded. Its wooded grounds remain
steadfastly serene as twelve lanes of
Roosevelt Boulevard traffic clamor by.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
new capital at Washington by President Thomas
Jefferson. The city named Frederick Graff
superintendent of the water works.
Graff was twenty-five, a third-generation
Philadelphia builder and carpenter, who had
been draftsman and assistant engineer on the
waterworks job. He decided to move the
water intake up the river to the bottom of
Fairmount, at the former Robert Morris estate.
A reservoir atop the mount would solve the
pressure problem. The intake structures and
pump house he designed in 1812 became,
and still are, an elegant sight on the banks of
the Schuylkill.
When Congress declared war on England in
1812, volunteers manned the guns at Fort
Mifflin, and military units were soon drilling in
the city, including one African-American
company. (The Abolition Society estimated in
1813 that there were in Philadelphia 9,672
“colored persons,” about four thousand of them
runaway slaves.) The city never was attacked,
the British preferring to burn down Washington
instead. On September 24, 1813, there was a
general illumination to honor Commodore
Perry’s victory over the British fleet on Lake
Erie, with his classic announcement that “We
have met the enemy and they are ours.” The city
HISTORIC PHILADELPHIA
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