Temperance fountain

The National Woman's Christian Temperance Union (NWCTU)'s organizing convention of 1874 encouraged its attendees to erect the fountains in their hometowns.

Originally, visitors were supposed to freely drink ice water flowing from the dolphins' snouts with a brass cup attached to the fountain and the overflow was collected by a trough for horses, but the city tired of replenishing the ice in a reservoir beneath the base and disconnected the supply pipes.

Other Cogswell fountains include one still standing in New York City's Tompkins Square Park,[7][8] and one in downtown Pawtucket, Rhode Island (1880).

[12] Although the D.C. statue survived mostly unscathed, the California and Market Street, San Francisco Statue of Henry D. Cogswell and Fountain was pulled down[13] on New Year's Eve Night of 1893-1894 by "a lynch party of self-professed art lovers" including Gelett Burgess (who was subsequently fired from his job at University of California at Berkeley),[14] Cogswell's 1879[15] Ben Franklin statue and temperance fountain in Washington Square, San Francisco remains unscathed to this day.

[17] In Dubuque, Iowa, a statue of Cogswell in Washington Park was pulled down by a group of vandals in 1900 and buried under the ground of a planned sidewalk.

[18] Simon Benson, an Oregon lumberman, was a teetotaler who wanted to discourage his workers from drinking alcohol in the middle of the day.