Lardner's Point Pumping Station

Lardner's Point Pumping Station. , For 200 years, Philadelphia used the Delaware River as a dump for sewage and industrial waste. The polluted river was a breeding ground for disease, so the city drew its drinking water from the cleaner Schuylkill River. But as the communities upstream grew, the Schuylkill itself became polluted., In 1900, plagued by annual outbreaks of typhoid and cholera, the city set out to build a water treatment system along the Delaware and the Schuylkill rivers. Nine years later, the system was up and running. The station here at Lardner's Point was its hear, pumping clean water down from the Torresdale filtering plant to homes and factories all over Philadelphia., In 1909, this building was part of the largest pumping station in the world. It still plays a vital role, pumping millions of gallons of water throughout Philadelphia each day., "Somerset," the home of four generations of the Lardner family, once stood on this site. Lynford Lardner had connections to the Penn family. He held several posts in the colony during the mid-1700s., [Caption:] , Of the four buildings that once stood here, only this building remains.