Thomas Hill Standpipe: Bangor's Iron Water Tower

On a hilltop in Bangor, Maine, a riveted iron cylinder dressed in a wooden frame jacket has held the city's water supply for over a century.

The Thomas Hill Standpipe was built in eighteen ninety-seven, when Bangor was at the height of its lumber-era wealth. The city needed a water tower large enough to maintain pressure across its hills, and it built one that also looked like something worth looking at. The tank holds one million, seven hundred fifty thousand gallons of water, with a metal shell fifty feet high and seventy-five feet across. The wooden cladding surrounding it gave the whole structure the look of a Victorian-era monument rather than a municipal utility.

Bangor was then one of the most important timber-shipping ports in the world, and civic pride ran high. The standpipe was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-four. It still serves the city's water system today, a working piece of infrastructure that has outlasted every lumber baron who built a mansion within sight of it.