41 Year Old Water Tower Heralded Marion, The Opportunity City
Perched 150 feet above the ground, two men with cutting torches have been sawing off the limb thery were sitting on this week as they dismantled the abandoned water tower that has stood at the Marion Water Plan on North Madison for 47 years.
Workmen for the Globe Construction Company of Henderson, Kentucky began taking the tower down Wednesday and expect to finish this Tuesday. They first removed the standpipe which extended from the ground 100 feet to the bottom of the elevated 150,000 gallon tank. They then began cutting away the rest of the tank in segments and dropping them one by one through the bottom.
Glenn Brown of Henderson, foreman on the job, explained that the half inch steel walls of the elevated tank were being cut into segments about eight feet by 20 feet. Each sheet of steel hit the ground with a terrific noise. Other members of the four man crew are Clyde Holland, Louis Lovelace and Jay Hogan.
With both the top and bottom of the big tank already cut away. Holland and Lovelace who manned the cutting torches Friday were working from steel ladders hung over the rim of the remaining cylinder of steel. As they cut out each segment of wall, they moved their ladders to a new section and started cutting again. Each man worked on a separate section. Operating a torch while holding a ladder, keeping free of a gas hose line dangling 100 feet to tanks on the ground, maneuvering a loosened section of steel as big as the side of a 20 foot room without going down with it, and jockeying a ladder to another point of vantage on the remaining rim of the tank all required a dexterity that appeared more hazardous in 32 degree weather, with no safety belt and no net below.
But to the workmen it is a way of life.
“That’s what we do mostly. Put ‘em up and take ‘em down,” said Brown, the young foreman who has been a steeplejack for nine years.
His company specializes in water towers, television, radio and microwave antenna construction and dismantling.
“There’s not much smokestack work anymore,” Brown commented. “Where we used to have about four smokestack jobs a year, we now have one about every four years.”
Pointing to a lettered steel plate at the base of one of the four steel legs of the tower which read that it was built by the Chicago Bridge Co. in 1920, Brown estimated that its construction by the use of rivets required about six months. Today, by use of the welding process, it could be built in seven weeks, he said.
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The old water tower was first put into service January 10, 1921. It was quite an event because it heralded completion of Marion’s first central water supply system other than a previously unreliable distribution of water from deep wells. The filling of the water tower with water pumped from the new reservoir south of town was duly recorded in the Daily Republican of that day.
And on the following fourth of July another event happened which caused the water tower to break into print again. At 9 p.m. that day when the late W.H. Rix, who was water plant superintendent for many years, went home from the pump house, the tank high above the ground was filled to the brim with 150,000 gallons of water. The next morning it was empty.
Speculation was that someone stole or let at large 150,000 gallons of water. Mayor Elijah Lewis ordered an investigation. But if it was ever learned who let the water out, there was no public report.
Sometimes the tank was allowed to get too full, and overflowed. On such an occasion the night of March 30, 1924, a combination of circumstances stemming from a full tank plunged the city of Marion into darkness.
There was a high wind that night and power company spokesman explained later, the wind carried the water from the overflowing tank across the reservoir park to the company’s substation near East Boulevard, dousing electrical equipment with the equivalent of a cloudburst and putting it out of commission.
Marion was justly proud of its first standup water tank, and emblazoned on its side was the slogan, “Marion, the Opportunity City.”
There is no available record of the cost of the water tower, but several years after it was erected the Daily Republican in an article appraising the worth of the water system, estimated it would cost $30,000 to replace it. Seven years ago, the city spent $22,000 repairing it. Its successor, a 500,000 gallon water storage tower built in 1963 as part of a water system improvement program, cost $154,000.
Dismantling the abandoned rust eaten tank will cost the city $2,500.
(Glances at Life, by Homer Butler, published in the Marion Daily Republican on December 18, 1967)