… That Lincoln’s “brand new” 1874 water works was nearly abandoned only six years after it began?
You surely do know that Lincoln’s “Big Dig” is continuing apace this summer to replace the water system infrastructure. This not the first time Lincoln’s roads were trenched for water works.
In the town’s earliest years, water was drawn directly from private springs, wells, streams, and ponds. In the mid-1800’s the Massachusetts General Court assumed control of the Commonwealth’s large bodies of fresh water, such as Flint’s Pond. In 1872 both Concord and Lincoln were authorized to draw water from the Pond. The two towns agreed that in the event the water “proved insufficient for both towns, the town of Lincoln shall be first supplied,” and our town meeting voted approval in 1872.
By 1874, construction of a pumping station at the Pond and a reservoir at the top of Lincoln Hill had begun, and crews had started laying pipes. Concord also built a pump house on the west side of the Pond, which is still standing but was decommissioned in 1911. By 1875, the Concord Freeman reported that the first “takers” in both towns had good supplies of water through the new pipes. Upon completion in early 1876, the Water Works featured nearly three miles of cement-lined wrought iron pipe and several hydrants, all in the southerly part of town. The costs to that point were $33,000 (roughly equal to $1 million today), raised largely by loan. All too soon, there were complaints about increases in the flat rates charged to the relatively few early customers, some of whom refused to pay for the water they were receiving. An 1877, town vote eased this situation to some extent by authorizing the town to pay the $1,800 annual interest on the loan, with the water customers paying for the operating costs.
Rather soon, the reservoir on Lincoln Hill sprang leaks and the water mains were deemed too small, resulting in temporary closures of the works in 1879. Among townsfolk with dry or unreliable spigots, dehydration and consternation ensued. Discussion of town reinvestment in the five-year-old system quickly became heated and polarized. The 1880 town meeting was raucous and loud, dominated by speeches erudite and otherwise. Historian Jack MacLean notes that no town project until then had been as expensive or controversial and divisive as the water works. Though the anti-water faction emerged victorious from the meeting, the system survived by virtue of the expanding demand for water for homes, hydrants, and public watering troughs such as the one still standing at Five Corners.
Alongside the municipal system during this period were wells and private water rigs, including a circa 1885 windmill pumping water to a reservoir on the Baker land and a steam engine pump that pulled water from a spring on the Sherman farm in East Lincoln.
By 1902, the Works expenses had grown to over $101,000 (roughly $3.9 million today). It had added a new coal-fired, steam-driven pumping station (with a 67-foot smokestack!), acquired a narrow protective strip of land around the Pond, and extended piping under fifteen of the town’s fifty miles of roads, to serve two-thirds of homes and 73 hydrants. The system by then had over 135 takers (725 people, six greenhouses, and farm irrigation). Nonetheless, 35% of Lincoln’s roughly 1,200 inhabitants remained “off Works.” A quarter of the water pumped was sold at ten cents per thousand gallons to the Boston & Maine Railroad. (Locomotives of the day consumed up to 5,000 gallons on each trip from Boston to Fitchburg.) In addition to interest payments and deposits into a “sinking fund,” the town was paying $15 per year for each fire hydrant and $270 per year for water to public buildings and fountains.
Water has been flowing from Flint’s Pond and the more recent Tower Road well through a Works first laid underground nearly 150 years ago and now serving over 5,600 people. The latest upgrade started last year and continued this spring, laying 12-inch pipe to replace the old pipes with their time-encrusted insides. Compared to the stormy debates culminating in the “thumbs down” vote at the 1880 town meeting, there is little public controversy over the wisdom of reinvesting in our system.
More about the history of Lincoln’s Water Works can be found in John C. MacLean’s A Rich Harvest, pp. 476-480, and in the Report of the Special Committee on the Condition of the Water Works of 1902, and an article in The Lincoln Squirrel, September 28, 2014.
Craig Donaldson
Lincoln Historical Society
May 2026
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