Discovered: Philadelphia’s high-tech, totally natural plumbing of 1812

Wow, that is an interesting find. They used hollowed out trees for plumbing.

Philadelphia was little more than a decade removed from serving as the nation’s capital when a work gang on Spruce Street began installing the latest in 1812 sanitation technology: a water main made of hollow tree trunks.

The sections of 10-foot pine logs, laboriously drilled to create a 4- to 6-inch center opening and bound together by iron couplings, connected the expanding edge of the city to the water tanks that stood on a hill less than a mile away.


The wooden plumbing supplied timber-tasting water to residents who could either fill their buckets for free at a public standpipe or pay $5 a year to connect directly to faucets in their yards or kitchens. The logs served for two decades until the city replaced them with 12-inch, cast-iron pipes in 1831, according to Adam Levine, resident historian at the Philadelphia Water Department.


The pine pipes lay buried and forgotten for two centuries until a worker sank a backhoe in the 900 block of Spruce Street earlier this week. The utility crew — the public-works heirs of the men who installed the wooden water mains during the James Madison administration — was replacing the old cast piping with what’s known as a ductile iron main. A tree expert spotted the exposed wooden pipes while walking her bike past the construction zone.


“This didn’t look like a normal tree,” arborist Julie Snell said, according to a description of the find released by the water department. The Philadelphia Inquirer first reported the discovery Friday.