Schaefferstown: One of North America's Oldest Public Water Systems
Near Reading, Pennsylvania
The small square you're near holds a piece of infrastructure history that most cities cannot claim. In the seventeen forties, a Swiss-German immigrant named Alexander Schaeffer built a hotel on this square and soon after began constructing a water system to serve the community. On July sixteenth, seventeen sixty-three, he and his wife Anna Engle deeded this land, now Fountain Park, for the permanent use of the town's residents.
That act made Schaefferstown home to one of the oldest documented public water systems in all of North America. The present water company was chartered in eighteen forty-five, calling itself successor to the Fountain Company of Heidelberg. The spring still flows.
Towns across America would not achieve municipal water systems like this for another century or more, yet this small Lebanon County village was piping water to its square in the seventeen hundreds.
