Clear Spring Waters of Houston!
by Louis F. Aulbach
When the Allen brothers established the Houston Town Company in 1836, they paid a lot of attention to the promotion and sale of town lots, but they thought little of services for the new residents, such as a municipal water supply. As a result, the residents of Houston were on their own to find drinking water and water for use in their homes.
For the first fifty years, residents of Houston relied on cisterns to capture and store rain water for personal use. Bayou water and some shallow wells were used to supplement the supplies of water when necessary. Although some cisterns were above ground structures, many homes and businesses had subterranian cisterns. Excavations at the Horace Taylor home site in Sesqiucentennial Park uncovered a 16 foot deep, bottle-shaped brick cistern that was a water supply for his large farmstead. Recent excavations in the Frost Town area have unearthed smaller, but more common, residential cisterns.
Even when the City Waterworks opened in 1879, the city water system pumped water directly from Buffalo Bayou, and bayou water was as unappetizing then as it is now. In 1887, two artesian wells were drilled and brought on line to supply the public water system. The discovery that Houston was built over a vast reservoir of ground water permitted the city to grow apace for another half century or so until the Lake Houston and Lake Livingston surface water systems were constructed.
Today, evidence of the reservoir of fresh water in the ground beneath the City can be seen along Buffalo Bayou, if you know where to look.
An early Houston writer had remarked that there was a spring at the head of a gully that began near the southeast corner of Preston Avenue and Louisiana Street. A large puddle usually collected on Louisiana Street. While the street is now paved and the spring is buried, you can still see the free flow of spring water pouring forth from a large drain under the Louisiana Street bridge.
Farther downstream, the water-bearing sand layer is exposed by the bayou. At a point immediately below the US 59 bridge, the banks of the bayou, which are generally thick with clay, give way to sand. A small sandbar, about 30 yards in length, lies along the south bank of the bayou. At the foot of this sandbar, with a nice view of the former International and Great Northern Railroad bridge and the former Myers-Spalti Manufacturing Company in the distance, artesian water bubbles up and flows into the bayou. It almost looks pure enough to dip one's cup into the bubbles for a drink!
But, use caution. I did say "almost."