The Right to Clean Water

In the years after the 1893 Fair demonstrated a more sanitary future for city dwellers, most Americans still did not have reliable access to safe water supplies. Even today, we know that certain municipalities have better or worse access to safe water, and that this access often maps directly onto race and socioeconomic status—consider the ongoing water crisis that the people of Flint, Michigan, are still contending with.

Beginning in 1851, outbreaks of waterborne diseases like cholera spurred Chicago city leaders into action with the creation of a municipal water board and the institution of a piped water system (Keating 2005). Yet the pace and extent of water infrastructure was slow and uneven, with differential access to Lake Michigan’s water dependent upon socioeconomic status. An 1892 publication on Chicago’s water crisis characterizes the problem in bold strokes: “As is well known, the water supply is taken from Lake Michigan. It is inexhaustible in quantity, and of the best quality, provided it is not contaminated by the sewage of the city” (Jackson 1892:10). Much has been written about the attempts to provide clean water to Chicagoans, from extending the water crib intakes farther into the lake, to building the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal (1900) for the purpose of sewage collection, to ultimately reversing the flow of the Chicago River where sewage previously had flowed from it into the lake. (Compare this to the history of waste disposal in Chicago discussed here.)

This lack of safe water was the case in many parts of the US, well into the 20th century. “[I]n 1929, nearly thirty-five years after the World’s Columbian Exposition shut its doors and as the Charnley House was being altered with an addition, Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd noted in their classic sociological study of cultural change in ‘Middletown’ (their pseudonym for a ‘typical’ small American city, now known to be Muncie, Indiana) that ‘it is not uncommon to observe 1890 and 1924 habits jostling along side by side in a family with primitive back-yard water or sewage habits, yet using an automobile, electric washer, electric iron, and vacuum cleaner’ (Lynd and Lynd [1929] 1956:97–98)” (Graff 2020:5).

“Providing urban sanitary services like sewerage, water, and trash disposal is now considered the duty of a municipality’s government, although this is a relatively recent development (Melosi 2000), as evidenced by the Charnley-Persky House’s trash midden” (Graff 2020:100). Recovering so many bottles of water from a house one block away from Lake Michigan shows both a preference in taste and perhaps a real preference—not to mention an ability to pay—for safe water, in a neighborhood where many Chicagoans died from waterborne diseases and could not rely on the quality of the water that was piped in.

Water Bottles from the Charnley House

Consumer’s Company water bottle: Found at the Charnley-Persky House, the Consumers Company of Chicago touted their double-distilled table water, “Hydrox,” as the standard of excellence in water.

Round-bottomed soda bottle: These thick-walled bottles were not intended to be placed upright. They had cork stoppers that needed to be kept wet to effectively seal the bottle and keep the contents carbonated. This particular style of round bottle was manufactured between the 1890s and the 1920s, though other types were produced beginning in the 1840s.

A. Carpenter Co. soda bottle: Andrew Carpenter's (1838—1913) soda water manufacturing and bottling business was located at 77 Institute Place (now 158 Institute Place) in Chicago, only a mile from the Charnley-Persky House where this bottle was found. He immigrated from Cologne, Germany, in 1853 and began making soda water and bottles by 1900. The Hutchinson-style topper on this bottle was patented in 1879 and would have been made of a rubber gasket held between two metal plates. Like the round-bottomed soda bottle, this bottle held carbonated soda and needed a tight seal.

Related innovations in Hygiene and Sanitation

While the question of whether or not the water you were drinking was safe or not, there were contemporaneous advances in sanitation and hygiene that also improved health and surgical outcomes. Evidence for one of these items and its related practices comes from a large number of Listerine bottles recovered from the Charnley House excavations.

Listerine: Manufactured by the Lambert Pharmacal Company of St. Louis, Listerine was introduced to market in 1895 and is still produced today. It quickly became a household name and was one of the first medical products offered over the counter in 1914. The changing uses and preparations of Listerine also reflect the shift away from miasma theory—that diseases are caused by “bad” or polluted air and water—toward what is commonly called germ theory—that diseases are caused by microorganisms in the air and water.

Listerine was not originally designed for oral use as it is today. Instead, the first versions of Listerine were formulated for use in surgery to clean wounds and to disinfect surfaces, making surgical spaces more sanitary. (In fact its name derives from that of hygienic pioneer Joseph Lister, famed for his successful use of carbolic acid as a surgical antiseptic, which further cemented the germ theory of disease.) Later on, it was used as a topical product. The advertisement from the May 1, 1916 edition of Vogue magazine (page 166) has copy that suggest its use as a deodorant, for bathing, and as a dentifrice (or mouthwash).

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