Drinking fountains in Philadelphia
[4][5] Latrobe's chief draftsman, Frederick Graff, designed a T-shaped wooden fire hydrant in 1802, that featured "a drinking fountain on one side and a 4-1/2-inch water main on the other.
[8] The Watering Committee commissioned sculptor William Rush to create a statue, Allegory of the Schuylkill River, to be its centerpiece.
The first public drinking fountains in England appeared in Liverpool in 1854, through the efforts of Charles Pierre Melly, and that city had 43 in total by 1858.
[11] The first in London was a granite basin attached to the gates of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, funded by Samuel Gurney and his Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association in 1859.
A clear, cold, mountain spring is carried by a spout, covered with a lion's head, from a niche in a granite front, with pilasters and pediment into a marble basin.
They quickly proved their "utility and absolute necessity;" by September 1869 the Fountain Society had constructed 12, and the Pennsylvania branch of the ASPCA (PSPCA) had built another 5.
[19][20][21] "[O]ur object", wrote Swann, "is the erection and maintenance in this city of public drinking fountains for the health and refreshment of the people of Philadelphia and the benefit of dumb animals".
[25] Some of Swann's arguments may have been derived from the like-minded London Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association, established in 1859.
[21] Prominent citizens such as John Wanamaker and Anthony Joseph Drexel provided funding to the society, and by July there were five operational fountains.
[21] By 1869, the activist Caroline Earle White had grown frustrated with her exclusion from any decision-making role in the PSPCA, which she had helped to found.
She created a Women's Branch, essentially an auxiliary,[34] which also independently commissioned the construction of public drinking fountains and horse troughs.
[37] White fully broke away from the PSPCA in 1899, founding the independent Women's Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, or WPSPCA.
[37] White was assisted by the efforts and financial support of the WPSPCA's vice-president, Annie L. Lowry, the childless widow of a successful Philadelphia lawyer.
[34] A crusade is being conducted in Philadelphia, and has been for six years past, by the members of the Women's Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
In 1906, Mrs. Bradbury Bedell, a member of the Women's Society who had long been active in seeking better conditions for animals in Philadelphia, and the late Mrs. A. L. Lowry, another woman who for years had sought successfully to aid in the comfort of the dumb beasts, debated over the filthiness of many of the water troughs located around the city.
Then the thought came to them that the society could in time establish sufficient stations to crush out the horse trough evil, and the campaign was started.
The city authorities have cheerfully aided the Women's Society here by furnishing the supply of water free for all the stations and in other ways.
The local membership of the Sons of Temperance funded a drinking fountain, originally installed under a pergola at the 1876 Centennial Exposition and later moved to Independence Square in 1877.
[43] Also for the 1876 exposition the German-American sculptor Herman Kirn produced the elaborate Catholic Total Abstinence Union Fountain.
