Delaware, Ohio: the sulfur spring, the water works of 1889 and the sewers of 1902

Delaware had no water works until 1889. The 1880 History of Delaware County and Ohio says that before then the town's sulfur spring was improved and bathing houses were built close to the water, which invalids patronized, and the hotel built beside that spring in 1833 is still standing on the Ohio Wesleyan University campus. In 1889 the Ohio State Board of Health printed a paper reporting that the town drew its water from rain and from shallow wells and had no regular system of sewerage. The water works were accepted in October 1889, and the sewers did not begin until 1902, after the state refused a plan that would have emptied raw sewage into the Olentangy above Columbus. This page follows Delaware's water, its waste and what the census counted in its houses, from that spring to the plants that serve the city now, and every sentence names the document its figures come from.

Last updated September 2026 · Figures are the Ohio State Board of Health's, the Sanborn Map Company's, the Census Bureau's, the Geological Survey's, Ohio EPA's and the city's own, read September 2026 · No prices on this page; the Estimate Builder carries those · Part of the knowledge base

The town, the spring and the gift

The City of Delaware says Moses Byxbe "laid out a town on the east bank of the Olentangy River" in the spring of 1808, changed his mind within days, and platted the town on the west bank instead. The 1880 History of Delaware County and Ohio records the same reversal. The City gives May 9, 1808, when Byxbe filed the plan of the town; the 1880 history gives March 10, 1808, for the recording of a plat in the Recorder's office of Franklin County. The two may describe two different plats, and both dates print here.

The spring itself was a gift to the town. The 1880 county history says Judge Henry Baldwin, one of the town's original proprietors, "presented to the town the sulphur spring, with four acres of ground" at a public dinner on Saturday, July 3, 1824. The same book tells the story again in another chapter, dates that gift to 1828, and credits it jointly to Baldwin and Moses Byxbe. Both tellings are printed here.

Bathing houses at the spring, and the hotel that became a college

Ohio Wesleyan University says the building now called Elliott Hall was built in 1833 as a hotel "called the Mansion House, to accommodate guests to the nearby Sulphur Spring." The 1880 county history says the same independently: two citizens erected a fine hotel that year on a lot embracing the springs, soon known as the Mansion House. The same book says elsewhere that it was finished in 1834, so no completion year is printed.

The same book describes the grounds. It says the old Barber cabin was pulled down when the spring was improved, and that bathing houses were "constructed in convenient proximity to the waters," which invalids patronized.

The same history praises the water in its own century's language, and that is the only way it appears here. It says the waters were salubrious and the locality "as healthful as those of the more famous Saratoga Springs," and it reprints an analysis made by Dr. Mitchell in 1848 recommending the water for a list of ailments and calling it "calculated to remove glandular enlargements of the liver." Those are the book's words, not a finding about the water and not a comparison with anything sold today.

The hotel did not last. The 1880 history says "it was purchased by the citizens and presented to the Methodist Episcopal Church" for school purposes, and gives that year inconsistently, so none is printed. Ohio Wesleyan University dates its founding to 1842, and calls Elliott Hall the oldest building on its campus and "the oldest collegiate Greek Revival building in Ohio," in the university's own words. That date is the university's founding, not the year it took the building.

Indifferent: what the town had before the pipes

In February 1885 the Sanborn Map and Publishing Company summed up Delaware's water facilities, in the title block of sheet 1 of its map, in a single word: "Indifferent." It counted eighteen public cisterns.

Four years later the Ohio State Board of Health printed a paper on the subject, by S. E. Allen, M.D., of Delaware, in its annual report for 1889. The town, it says, had "a water supply from no distinct source," the water for domestic use coming from rain or from wells, with the addition of water from the sulfur springs. Most wells were shallow, "the depth averaging from about 12 to 26 feet."

On the waste side the paper is blunt. "Delaware has no regular system of sewerage," it says. Drains and ditches carried off surface water and the house slops that were not thrown into vaults or onto the ground; a vault in these reports is a privy vault. Of the stream itself: "The Delaware run is an open sewer, draining a large part of the town."

The water works of 1889

The same 1889 paper records the decision. The people of Delaware, it says, "last fall by popular vote gave a franchise" to Moffett, Hodgkins and Clarke of Watertown, New York, to build a system of water works. Lytle's 1908 county history gives the corporate half: the Delaware Water Company was incorporated in 1888 by eastern capitalists, and the city council granted it a franchise for the streets that year.

The paper records that river water was rejected as muddy in the spring freshets, and deep well water for its probable hardness, and that the decision was "to locate the works on the west bank of the Olentangy" three miles north of the city, to draw ground water.

Three publishers give the same year. Lytle says the mains were laid and the plant completed the year after the franchise, and the system "accepted and approved by the city on October 30," 1889. The Sanborn Map Company printed "Plant constructed in 1889" on its Delaware sheet of March 1911, and the Ohio State Board of Health said it twice, in its reports for 1901 and 1911.

The Sanborn map of October 1890 is the before and after. Where the 1885 block had counted cisterns, the 1890 block describes a Holly system with a pump house three miles north of the City Hall, water that "flows from Olentangy River through gravel bank into large well," fifteen and a half miles of pipe, and 206 double hydrants.

In its report for 1901 the Ohio State Board of Health counted nineteen miles of mains, "giving some 90 percent of the population," 902 service connections with 776 in use, and an average use of 421,000 gallons a day. Lytle's 1908 history counts about twenty-two and a half miles of main, 256 fire hydrants, and four bored wells 225 feet deep supplying three quarters to four fifths of the water.

The works stayed in private hands. The Delaware Blue Book of 1913, a local handbook, lists among its city facts a "Ten-year contract with Delaware Water Company expires December 31, 1920." No document read for this page gives the year the city took the system over, so none is printed.

Thirteen years of taps and no sewers

Water arrived in 1889; sewers did not arrive until 1902, and the state wrote the gap down more than once. In 1895 the Ohio State Board of Health recorded that "A public water supply was introduced into Delaware in 1889" and that the city was still without a system of sewerage. Its questionnaire return for 1896 answered "No general sewerage," with three private sewers discharging into the Olentangy River, and named general sewerage as what the place needed.

The first plan was refused. In 1900 the Board's committee visited and reported that it was "hardly advisable to allow raw sewage to be emptied into the Olentangy," because Columbus lay twenty-four miles downstream and drew Olentangy water raw whenever its other supplies ran short. The plan the Board approved the next year had treatment built into it: a separate sanitary system with septic tanks and coke contact beds, "all storm and roof waters being excluded."

The Board's report for 1911 describes what was built. Before 1902, it says, "there was no system of sewers which could properly be so called," and beginning in that year some thirteen miles of vitrified pipe sewer were laid, from eight to twenty-four inches in diameter. The 1913 Delaware Blue Book lists the same thirteen miles, with three more to come that year, and adds a count found nowhere else: "Over 1,100 houses are connected with the system." The Census Bureau counted 9,076 people in the city in 1910, a figure from a different publisher.

The plant was in trouble early. The Board says it stood on low ground about half a mile south of the city, inside a high dike that "proved to be inadequate in preventing damage to the plant by every freshet." In October 1908 the Board's secretary wrote that no purification was being achieved after the septic tanks and that "The Olentangy River is, therefore, being polluted by the sewage" of the city. On March 2, 1911 the Board approved plans for a new purification plant on four conditions, one of them that "at least ten acres of ground be purchased as a site." What became of that plant is not recorded in any document read for this page.

The floods, and the dam above the town

In the flood of March 1913 the Ohio State Board of Health's inspectors reached Delaware on March 28. Their report says "all of the bridges were washed away" there, that "115 families were made homeless; 18 bodies have been recovered," and that twenty-one people were still missing. Those are the Board's counts as of its own report, a snapshot rather than a final toll. What the same flood did downstream is on the page about Franklinton and the 1913 flood. How that same flood changed the law elsewhere in Ohio, the Conservancy Act, is on the page about Ohio's fires, floods and collapses.

The river above the town was later dammed. The United States Geological Survey places the Corps of Engineers' Delaware Dam "4 miles north of Delaware" and gives the drainage area it holds back as 381 square miles. The federal flood insurance study for Franklin County, quoted on this site's Franklinton page, says construction was begun in 1946 and completed in 1951; the Geological Survey says flow on the Olentangy has been regulated by the reservoir beginning in 1947. Those measure different things: the building span, and the year the reservoir began regulating the river. The federal act that authorized the dam is set out on the floods, dams, levees and floodwalls page, together with the other Central Ohio flood-control lakes.

What the dam was worth below it was measured in the flood of January 1959. The Geological Survey, quoting preliminary estimates by the Corps of Engineers of the peak stages held down by storage in the reservoir, gives "14 feet at Delaware, 9.2 feet at Worthington," with smaller reductions again at Columbus and Chillicothe. The largest was at Delaware itself.

What the census counted in Delaware

The Census Bureau's series for the city, printed in the 1950 count, gives 8,224 people in 1890, 7,940 in 1900, 9,076 in 1910, 8,756 in 1920, 8,675 in 1930 and 8,944 in 1940. Its population fell in three separate decades between 1890 and 1930, and did not pass ten thousand until 1950, when the Bureau counted 11,804.

Size decides which tables carry a town by name, and the two censuses measured different things. For 1940 the count is in the Census of Housing volume for small areas: 2,836 dwelling units in the city, of which 2,460 reported, 780 with "no private bath," the table's own category, meaning no bath for the exclusive use of the unit's occupants, and 604 needing major repairs.

By 1950 Delaware was large enough for the table for urban places of ten thousand or more, which asked about the bathing equipment itself. It counted 3,341 dwelling units. The rows below are that table's own categories in its own words, and each of the three sets adds back to 3,341.

The two years are not the same measurement: 1940 counted units with no private bath, which includes a shared one, while 1950 counted units with no bathtub or shower at all and gave shared ones a row of their own.

The same census dated the housing. Of the 3,205 Delaware dwelling units that gave a year built, 2,695 had been built in "1919 or earlier," a row whose headnote says the statistics rest on a 20 percent sample. What the Bureau recorded about Ohio bathrooms decade by decade is on the page about how and when Ohio homes got indoor plumbing. What the Bureau counts in Delaware, Licking and Fairfield County houses now is on the page on those three counties by the numbers.

Delaware today

The Census Bureau's estimate for 2024 puts Delaware at 46,521 people, against the 11,804 it counted in 1950. The City of Delaware says its water plant treats and distributes an average of 3.65 million gallons a day to more than 12,000 customers, through "190 miles of water lines and 2,000 fire hydrants," and describes a sewer system of "175 miles of sewer line, 3,250 manholes and 12 pump stations." The state counted thirteen miles of sewer here in 1911.

One thing did not change. Ohio EPA states in its 2023 fact sheet for the city's wastewater permit that "The City of Delaware has 100% separate sewers in the collection system," which is what the state insisted on in 1901. Columbus, whose older streets carry storm water and sewage in one pipe, is a different story, told on the page about the Columbus sewers then and now.

Ohio EPA also states that the City of Delaware's potable water comes from the Olentangy River, and the city says the same of its primary source. The fact sheet records that the Upper Olentangy Water Reclamation Center "discharges to the Olentangy River at River Mile 25.27" with an average design flow of 10.0 million gallons a day, and places the city's drinking water intake upstream of that outfall. Which utility serves an address elsewhere in Delaware County is on the page about water and sewer providers in Central Ohio towns.

Who reviews plumbing work inside the city

The City of Delaware's building division says "The City does not review plumbing permits," and sends plumbing applications to the county health district instead. That agency calls itself the Delaware Public Health District, and says its plumbing unit inspects new plumbing in Delaware County "except in the cities of Columbus, Dublin, and Westerville." The same building division describes itself as a state-certified building department, and says a remodel permit is required for any remodel that includes structural, electrical or mechanical work, "other than simply updating fixtures." The county's own building department is named on the page about bathroom electrical work in Ohio.

What a remodel in an older Delaware house meets today

A bathroom in an older Delaware house meets the rules of whichever building department covers that address. The site's other pages carry what does not change from one address to the next: the Ohio plumbing code page, the permit page, the lead and asbestos page for a house built before 1978, the supply pipes page, and the wells and septic page. Nothing here changes any of that.

Sources

Every figure, date and quotation on this page comes from one of these documents, read on the date given. Where two of them disagree, the page says so.

• City of Delaware, Ohio, History of Delaware (About Us), read through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, undated; read September 2026.
• O. L. Baskin and Co., Chicago, History of Delaware County and Ohio (1880), pp. 202, 247-249, 302, 340, 342, 366, 368, 1880; read September 2026.
• Ohio Wesleyan University, Historic Sites (History and Traditions), undated; read September 2026.
• Sanborn Map and Publishing Co. (Library of Congress), Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Delaware, Delaware County, Ohio, February 1885, sheet 1, February 1885; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Fourth Annual Report of the State Board of Health of the State of Ohio (1889), 'Water Supply and Drainage of Delaware' by S. E. Allen, M.D., pp. 309-316, 1889; read September 2026.
• B. F. Bowen and Company (J. R. Lytle, editor), 20th Century History of Delaware County, Ohio and Representative Citizens (1908), p. 118, section headed WATER WORKS, 1908; read September 2026.
• Sanborn Map Company (Library of Congress), Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Delaware, Delaware County, Ohio, March 1911, sheet 1, March 1911; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Sixteenth Annual Report of the State Board of Health of the State of Ohio for the year ending October 31, 1901: 'Report on a System of Sewerage and Sewage Disposal for Delaware', pp. 110-112, and Appendix II, water supply of Delaware, pp. 441-442, 1901; read September 2026.
• Sanborn-Perris Map Co. (Library of Congress), Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Delaware, Delaware County, Ohio, October 1890, sheet 1, October 1890; read September 2026.
• Delaware County Memory (administered by the Community Library, Sunbury, Ohio), The Delaware, Ohio, Blue Book; Some Facts and Figgers. 1913, compiled by C. A. Jones and G. G. Whitehead, section headed City Facts, 1913; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Tenth Annual Report of the State Board of Health of the State of Ohio for the year ending October 31, 1895, report on sewerage for the Delaware County jail, pp. 107-109, 1895; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Eleventh Annual Report of the State Board of Health of the State of Ohio for the year ending October 31, 1896, annual returns from cities and villages, pp. 187-188, 1896; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Fifteenth Annual Report of the State Board of Health of the State of Ohio for the year ending October 31, 1900, 'Report on Proposed Sewerage for Delaware', pp. 121-123, 1900; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Twenty-sixth Annual Report of the State Board of Health of the State of Ohio for the Year Ending December 31, 1911: 'Report on Proposed New Sewage Purification Plant for Delaware', pp. 291-294, with Board action at pp. 29 and 146, 1912; read September 2026.
• United States Bureau of the Census, 1950 Census of Population, Volume I: Number of Inhabitants, Ohio, Table 4, Population of Cities of 10,000 or More from Earliest Census to 1950, p. 35-9, 1952; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Twenty-third Annual Report of the State Board of Health of the State of Ohio for the year ending December 31, 1908, pp. 161-162, 1909; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Twenty-eighth Annual Report of the State Board of Health of the State of Ohio for the Year Ending December 31, 1913, flood conditions at Delaware, p. 216, 1914; read September 2026.
• United States Geological Survey, Circular 418, Floods of January-February 1959 in Ohio, pp. 8-10 and station 86, Delaware Reservoir near Delaware, Ohio, 1959; read September 2026.
• Federal Emergency Management Agency, Flood Insurance Study, Franklin County, Ohio and Incorporated Areas, the Delaware Dam construction dates as printed on this site's Franklinton page, revised June 16, 2011; read September 2026.
• United States Bureau of the Census, 1940 Census of Housing, Volume I: Data for Small Areas, Part 2, Table 5, Characteristics of Housing for Counties, by Minor Civil Divisions, and Incorporated Places of 1,000 Inhabitants or More, Ohio, p. 226, 1943; read September 2026.
• United States Bureau of the Census, 1950 Census of Housing, Volume I: General Characteristics, Part 5, Ohio, Table 17, Occupancy Characteristics, Type of Structure, and Plumbing Facilities, p. 35-21, 1953; read September 2026.
• United States Bureau of the Census, 1950 Census of Housing, Volume I: General Characteristics, Part 5, Ohio, Table 20, Year Built and Equipment, p. 35-42, 1953; read September 2026.
• United States Bureau of the Census, Annual Estimates of the Resident Population for Incorporated Places, vintage 2024 (sub-est2024.csv), 2025; read September 2026.
• City of Delaware, Ohio, Our Utilities (Public Utilities Department), read through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, undated; read September 2026.
• Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, Fact Sheet for NPDES Permit Renewal, Upper Olentangy Water Reclamation Center, permit 4PD00004, pages 6 and 7, January 17, 2023; read September 2026.
• City of Delaware, Ohio, Building Division (Planning and Community Development), read through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, undated; read September 2026.
• Delaware Public Health District, Plumbing (Environmental Services), read through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, undated; read September 2026.

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