The first reservoir at Easton was built in 1886. It covered 46 acres and held just over two hundred million gallons of water. It was typical of the reservoirs that had been built in northern Bridgeport and its surrounds; a small lake held back by a dam built either of stone or compacted earth. Such edifices were sufficient in most cases but were subject to premature failure if they were overrun with water during a particularly severe bout of weather. The positive of a dam that was less than twenty feet in height was that it seldom posed the threat of colossal and widespread damage downstream should it fail. The negative was that the volume of water it held back wasn’t large enough to sustain a large community with an adequate supply of water during times of drought. Reservoirs that sat at lower elevations closer to the city, also provided less water pressure in the event of a major fire or times of heavy usage by industry.
Although sitting at a higher elevation than its counterparts, Easton Lake number One was deemed too small to remain a viable supplier to Bridgeport’s growing industrial population. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the original reservoir saw a second, much larger reservoir constructed less than a quarter mile to the north on the same river. Number Two would cover an additional 150 acres and hold over eight hundred million gallons of water, making Easton’s total available water supply more than one billion gallons; nearly a five-fold increase in capacity while using the same source of supply.
Easton Lake number Two would feed into number One much like the present Saugatuck feeds into the Aspetuck Reservoir and then into the Hemlock. Piggy-backing reservoirs became a hallmark of the Bridgeport Hydraulic Company (BHC) that allowed it to store massive amounts of water for use in the city but with the need for a minimum amount of underground piping to get it there.
In 1901, the Bridgeport Hydraulic Company hired a 27-year-old Lehigh University graduate by the name of Samuel Palmer Senior to serve as superintendent in charge of the company’s planners. It didn’t take long for the young engineer to envision the need to greatly expand the company’s reservoir systems to meet the growing needs of the greater Bridgeport area. Instead of the series of tiny reservoirs, Senior saw fewer, but much larger reservoirs in the company’s future. Trap Falls, Senior’s first large project that included the company’s first all concrete dam, was already under construction in 1905 when the earthen dam at Bunnell Pond failed during a massive August storm.
Concrete was Senior’s answer to building larger reservoirs that would pose less of a risk for failure while holding back multiple times the volume of water than either stone or earthen dams were capable of.
Even before the beginning of World War One, the company was actively planning for increased capacity, so in addition to the newest and largest reservoir that was being planned in the Saugatuck Valley, Easton Lake number Three was being designed to replace both smaller reservoirs at the Narrows. The additional lands that the BHC required were all purchased by 1915. At a planned height of one hundred and twenty-five feet, the new dam would impound six billion gallons of water, a six-fold increase over the two smaller reservoirs that number Three was scheduled to replace and nearly a thirty-fold increase from the capacity of the original 1886 facility: all without adding another source of water.
Senior’s visions of greater needs and larger reservoirs were soon justified as Bridgeport grew into an industrial powerhouse during the First World War. Daily water consumption in the city grew from approximately twenty-five million gallons per day in 1914 to thirty-four million gallons a day by 1918. Preliminary site work for the new dam at Easton began in 1917 but was soon halted as material costs skyrocketed due to shortages of supplies when the United States formally entered the war a few months later. The Easton project was put on hold indefinitely.
When construction of number Three began in earnest in 1924, both number One and number Two needed to be drained. The reservoirs were lowered by drawing down the stored water behind their dams. When both were virtually empty, number One was breached using dynamite; blowing a hole in the center of the stone and masonry structure that was several yards wide. The remains of number One have been left virtually untouched for the past 100 years and are still visible between South Park Avenue and Buck Hill Road.
Number Two was more difficult, as it needed to be completely removed to allow the new number Three dam to be built in front of it. Built more of compacted earth and stone, it was excavated by machines and moved out of the way while the land to the south was prepared to accept the new concrete dam that would replace it.
Unlike most water companies, the BHC owned its own construction company. By 1921, they had already constructed four concrete dams, including Trap Falls in Shelton, Samp Mortar and the Hemlocks in Fairfield, and the Aspetuck in Easton. In addition, they also owned a three-hundred-foot dock along with an adjoining storage yard in the west end of Bridgeport where practically all their pipe was landed and stored. A large fleet of trucks that hauled their cement and coal was in a garage in downtown Bridgeport. The company even owned their own locomotives which were used on rail tracks that were temporarily installed at construction sites so that materials could easily be moved. It was a self-sufficient operation that could move fast and economically when development and construction was called for.
The construction of the number Three dam at Easton Lake began in 1924. It would take three years to complete. The company built its own stone crushing and concrete plant on the western side of the valley that could provide all the aggregate and concrete needed to build the structure. Tracks were laid for the company’s mini railroad that moved materials from a staging area in the basin of the recently drained number One. The entire operation was a marvelous combination of men, machinery, and engineering. The company’s dedication to detail saw the entire valley replanted with conifers it had grown in its own nurseries. Within only a few short years, the area surrounding the reservoir and the land below the dam appeared as if it had been there forever.
The Bridgeport Hydraulic Company could have chosen to simply abandon the two smaller Easton reservoirs and sell off the land much like they had done with Canoe Brook Lake in Trumbull, Samp Mortar in Fairfield, and most of their small reservoirs in northern Bridgeport. Instead, it chose to build Easton Lake number Three, retaining all the watershed lands along the Mill River to the north so that much Easton has remained wooded and largely undeveloped.
Most of the photos in the article are part of the extensive BHC collection that the Historical Society of Easton maintains and has digitized to make them easier to share.
