History
Seeking to expand New York City's water supply, engineers of the city Aqueduct Commission designed in 1884 a 275 - 300 ft. high masonry dam spanning the Croton River near its mouth. The resulting storage reservoir, empounding a 16 square mile (25.6 km²) watershed, would hold 14.2 billion US gallons (54,000,000 m3) at full capacity. The Croton Falls Dam was placed into service in 1911.
In the 1890s, rather than resorting to expensive filtration, New York City ordered the destruction or relocation of any village or hamlet threatening to pollute the Croton or its tributaries. Many were moved.
The Croton remains an important part of the City's water supply today.
Read more about this topic: Croton River
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“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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“As I am, so shall I associate, and so shall I act; Caesar’s history will paint out Caesar.”
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