Water for a “shining city on a hill” For more than two hundred years, from 1630 to 1848, Boston Proper was a cramped town on an island-like peninsula surrounded by tidal flats. Ironically, it was initially settled in preference to a mainland location nearby because Boston’s peninsula had a plentiful spring — sufficient for 1630 but not a century and a half later. For the most part, its residents were dependent on water from its ancient original spring, or roof runoff collected in rain-barrels, or well water that was often brackish and/or contaminated. Boston needed a true aqueduct capable of carrying enough water for the entire city many miles from an uncontaminated source. Ask most people to describe an aqueduct and they will call forth a multi-arched structure, such as those whose ruins march across the flat countryside leading to Rome. However, those are iconic “aqueduct bridges.” The actual aqueduct is just the water channel along their tops. An aqueduct is simply a conduit carrying an artificial stream — water diverted at an elevation sufficiently high that it can be directed to flow, falling at only a few inches per mile, to a desired location. Most often aqueducts follow uniform elevation land contours. Sometimes they tunnel. Occasionally are they carried on multi-arched structures. Over the course of the Boston’s third century, from 1846 to 1940, the city and then the state, built five aqueducts that conveyed increasing quantities of water to the city and its region from ever more pristine, higher and more distant sources. All but the last of these aqueducts operated entirely, or largely, like their Roman forbears, as artificial streams flowing in uniformly sloped channels that, although for the most part covered, were not normally filled, as a pipe under pressure would be Although eventually replaced by deep tunnels from the Quabbin Reservoir in the center of the state, the city’s five original aqueducts survive. All but the oldest still belong to the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA), the ultimate successor to the Boston and Metropolitan Water Works, and still serve as backups. Modern recreational uses Four of the five have now become, for at least part of their lengths, long distance walking trails, sponsored by the municipalities they pass through and/or the MWRA. This acceptance of public use is a significant departure from a longstanding “No trespassing” policy. Maps and descriptions This profusely illustrated volume is divided into five sections, one for each aqueduct. In addition to discussing the history of the aqueducts and their gatehouses, aqueduct bridges, dams and other structures, there is also an attempt to generally map and describe the route of each: The Cochituate Aqueduct (1846-48) — 14 miles long from Lake Cochituate in Wayland to the Brookline Reservoir and later the Chestnut Hill Reservoir in Brighton, both 125 feet above Boston’s Back Bay. The Sudbury Aqueduct (1875-78) — Originally 16 miles long beginning at Farm Pond in Framingham. It includes the Waban Arches and Echo Bridge Aqueduct bridges and ends at the Chestnut Hill Reservoir in Brighton, about 125 feet above Back Bay level. The Wachusett Aqueduct (1896-98) — 12 miles long and fed by Lake Wachusett, it terminated at the Sudbury Reservoir in Southborough, indirectly feeding the Sudbury Aqueduct, it subsequently ended, at the Hultman Aqueduct in Marlborough. It includes the Assabet River Aqueduct Bridge. The Weston Aqueduct (1901-03 ) — 13-1/2 miles long and fed by the Sudbury Reservoir, it terminates at the Weston Reservoir in Weston, about 200 feet above Back Bay level. The Hultman Aqueduct (1938-40) — 18 miles long and originally fed by the Wachusett Aqueduct, it ends at the Norumbega Reservoir in Weston, about 262 feet above Back Bay level.