By Kafia A. Hosh
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 2, 2008
For the past year, Max Mellott has diligently researched the history of Leesburg's water and sewer system, spending hours at Thomas Balch Library flipping through old newspaper clippings and 19th-century handwritten notes from Town Council meetings.
Mellott is assistant superintendent of Leesburg's Utility Maintenance Division and a local history buff. It's in the latter role that he has slowly been piecing together a chronology of Leesburg's utilities upgrades.
"There's evidence that there was a water system of sorts going back to the [early] 1800s," he said.
In July, that evidence came to life with the discovery of an eight-foot-long hollow log once used to pipe water.
A contractor stumbled upon the log as he was cleaning and restoring a pond on a sprawling property along Dry Mill Road and Loudoun Street.
John Cook, the property owner, said he thought the piece of wood might have historical value and notified the utility division.
The log pipe was the exclamation point to Mellott's research.
"Lo and behold, when they were out there doing that excavating work, here that thing rolls out," he said. "It was almost like striking gold."
Leesburg used a wooden pipe system during most of the 19th century, the first technological breakthrough that reduced the town's reliance on wells.
The pipes brought water to the downtown area from two springs once on Cook's land. Water flowed into wooden pumps, hydrants and cisterns that were used for firefighting.
The log was found two feet underground, submerged in a heap of mud that helped keep it intact. Mellott has traced it to a utility system installed in the early 1800s.
"It's hard to imagine anything to lay in the ground that long and not fall apart," Mellott said.
The pipe is the biggest, and perhaps oldest, piece of that water system found.
The Loudoun Museum displays a two-foot-long log pipe thought to have been installed between 1820 and 1840. Town maintenance crews found that pipe during sewer renovations in the summer of 1977.
The museum log is held together by iron pieces. But the pipe found on Cook's property is made entirely of wood, which means it could be evidence of the town's first attempt to install a water system.
Metal bands later were added to log pipes to help protect them from splitting under water pressure, Mellott said.
The town utility staff marveled at the woodwork.
"It wasn't at all what I expected," said John Creamer, a 15-year employee in the utility division. "I was looking for the one with the brass."
Mellott and his staff are hoping to preserve the log with an acrylic polymer recommended by Tracy Coffing, an architectural conservator.
"If it's properly applied, it should not change the natural appearance of the color of the wood," said Coffing, who owns the Nightingale Group, a Leesburg consulting firm that works on building restoration and preservation projects.
The log sits on two wooden stumps and is tucked away in an empty corridor of the utility maintenance building. The building houses other artifacts, including two six-inch cast-iron pipes from 1908.
The log pipe was displayed at Town Hall during Leesburg's 250th anniversary celebration last month. Other than that, it hasn't received much public viewing.
Officials at the Loudoun Museum said they have no room to display the log but plan to expand their storage and exhibit space.
Once the museum expands, "one of the first things we'd love to have is that piece of water pipe," said Karen Quanbeck, the museum's executive director.
Mellott is continuing his research and has gotten as close to the present as the Town Council minutes from the 1970s.
Among his findings, he learned that before 1866 each council member was responsible for utilities maintenance on certain streets.
In April 1866, the council hired the first superintendent for the water system. The first major overhaul of the system occurred with the installation of cast-iron pipes in 1906 and 1907.
In the 1960s, as the town population grew, officials stopped using the springs and constructed a reservoir.
"It got to the point where it wasn't producing enough water for the town," Mellott said.
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