Reports from the
Chief Engineer and Surveyor
of the City of Philadelphia
1854-1889
In the second half of the 19th century and into the first half of the 20th century, the bailiwick of the City's Chief Engineer & Surveyor and his subordinates, the district surveyors, was nothing less than the creation of Philadelphia as we know it. The original city contained only the two square miles bound by Vine and South Streets, between the two rivers. With the passage of the Act of Consolidation in 1854, the City of Philadelphia absorbed the entire County of Philadelphia, expanding to 129 square miles. It was the City surveyors, in the Department of Surveys and later the Bureau of Surveys, who were responsible for designing bridges, developing plans for drainage of stormwater and sewage, laying the street grid over that mostly-rural territory--and then supervising the construction of this infrastructure.
The following reports are available as .pdf (portable document format) files, which use Adobe Acrobat Reader, a program loaded onto most computers. These are large files that will take time to download for anyone using a dial-up connection. If anyone has any suggestions on how to make these PDFs smaller, but still readable, I would appreciate hearing from you. (If, on the other hand, you are curious in the process I went through to get them as small as they are, I'd be glad to share it with you.)
The History of Philadelphia's Watersheds and Sewers
Historical Consultant
Philadelphia Water Department
Some of the PDFs were made from original copies of the reports in the PWD Historical Collection; others were made from Xerox copies from reports housed at the Free Library of Philadelphia, Government Documents Department. Some of these Xeroxes were my working copies and are marked up with underlining and other notations. I also included in the .pdfs parts of Highways Department reports and sections of the Annual Mayoral Messages, where they contained information pertaining to matters of interest, such as sewers and drainage. The Mayor's Messages were published almost every year from 1855 until the mid-1930s. At first they were printed and bound along with reports from all City departments, but after the publication of a monstrously unwieldy volume in 1884, the departmental or bureau reports began to be published separately. These reports, taken together, constitute an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the endless details and minutiae of City government. They were often published in the year following the work they describe; I identify by the earlier year, in which the work was done.
I hope to add to this collection of digital documents in
the future, both to fill in some of the gaps in this series and extend
it forward. Some details from Survey reports between 1856 and 1870, during
the tenure of Chief Engineer & Surveyor Strickland Kneass, are included
on a separate page and can be accessed here.
I also hope to link various indices of the reports that PWD Archives interns
have compiled.
1855 (317
kb)
1856 (444 kb)
1857 (535 kb)
1858 (607 kb)
1859 (544 kb)
1855 to1859 (2442 kb)
1860 (845 kb)
1861 (269 kb)
1862 (343 kb)
1863 (566 kb)
1864 (485 kb)
1866 (348 kb)
1869 (349 kb)
1873 (502 kb)
1883 (489 kb)
1884 (612 kb)
1885 (852 kb)
1886 (743 kb)
1888_Part1 (316 kb)
1888_Part2 (602 kb)
1888_Part3 (758 kb)
1889_Part1 (673 kb)
1889_Part2 (523 kb)
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Page last modified April 30, 2005
