On August 30, 1881, the city purchased the site of the Grafft planing mill on Front Street between Walnut and Summit from M. L. Van Meter, who had acquired the property after David Grafft's death. The price was $300. When the planing mill was established in 1856 or early the following year, a well was dug to provide water for the steam boiler. It tapped the same vein which supplied water for the Illinois Central at their tank at the south side of town.
This well was enlarged to ten feet in diameter to a depth of sixty feet and was walled with stone by David Glimpse and John Hibbs, who received $200. In March, 1882 the American Well Works bored two three-inch holes fifty-four feet from the bottom of the dug well and installed iron tubings and sand screens at a cost of $255.
July 3, 1882 the council voted bonds to provide the following: a forty foot tower; a tank, pump and twenty-foot windmill for $1,921, plus $885 paid Fairbanks, Morse & Co. for the tower and pump. Four blocks of steel-hooped wooden mains were laid from the tower east on Front Street to Cherry for $1,600. The cost was paid from the city treasury as has been done in extending water mains thereafter to all parts of the city.
On October 10, 1882, with only four feet of water in the new tower tank which was just being filled, fire broke out in the El Paso House and all the business houses in the east Front Street block were destroyed. Because of the uncertainty of windmill pumping, engine equipment was purchased from Fairbanks, Morse & Co. in July, 1884, at a cost of $770. An additional thirteen blocks of wooden mains were laid in that year. As all the trenches were dug by hand, it was a slow process. C. F. Curtiss recalls how the boys found these ditches an excellent place to play games like cops and robbers in the evening hours.
The first block east from the water tower was replaced in July and August, 1896 with our first iron mains. James Fitzgerald recalls he was street superintendent when these first iron mains were laid, as well as when the first water meters were installed and the first paving laid. Thirty men replaced the old wooden mains along Front and Pine Streets that November and December with six-inch and four-inch iron mains. In 1908 more replacements were made, and all wooden mains were replaced by 1933. Seventy blocks of water mains now serve the city. In 1952 an instrument to locate leaks was purchased, saving thousands of gallons daily and reducing the pumping by as much as one third.
After the Eagle Block was destroyed in the fire of July 19, 1894, the council voted October 1 to use the insurance from the loss of the city
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