History of the Winchester Waterworks, part two

In case you missed it, the first install­ment of this two-part sto­ry can be found here: History of the Winchester Waterworks, part one.

In 1890, the city award­ed a 25-year fran­chise to Wheeler & Parks to sup­ply water for the com­mu­ni­ty.  In 1904, with the com­pa­ny fac­ing bank­rupt­cy, William Wheeler pur­chased their assets for $10,000 and deed­ed the com­pa­ny to the Winchester Water Works Company.

The city addressed con­sumer com­plaints about water rates by attempt­ing to set its own rates.  The com­pa­ny sued, and the case even­tu­al­ly end­ed up at the US Supreme Court.  Smith Hays argued for Winchester, and Beverly Jouett for the Water Works.  The 1920 deci­sion in Winchester v. Winchester Water Works Company ruled that the city had no statu­to­ry author­i­ty to set rates for its franchisee.

In 1921, Winchester renewed the Water Works fran­chise for an addi­tion­al 20 years and final­ly secured its line to the riv­er.  Griping con­tin­ued unabat­ed, how­ev­er, and in 1932 the city began nego­ti­a­tions with the then-own­er, Chandler & Company of New York, to pur­chase the waterworks.

Talks of this sort con­tin­ued until 1945, when the city issued rev­enue bonds to pur­chase the water­works for $544,834 from General Water, Gas, and Electric of New Jersey.  A local ordi­nance placed “direc­tion and man­age­ment under a three-man water commission”—the Winchester Municipal Utilities Commission.  The city appoint­ed James B. Allen, L. L. Harrod, and Jack Hodgkin as the first commissioners. 

With the change in own­er­ship came a change in atti­tude, as sug­gest­ed by this state­ment in the Winchester Sun:

“Winchester’s water sup­ply sys­tem, con­sid­ered among Kentucky’s best for a small com­mu­ni­ty, has pro­vid­ed an ade­quate water sup­ply since the instal­la­tion of the pumps [at the Kentucky River] in 1922.”

In 1958, the util­i­ties com­mis­sion ordered a halt to the exten­sion of lines beyond city lim­its.  This led to the for­ma­tion of water dis­tricts to install rur­al water lines and obtain water from the city.  These were Clark County Water District No. 1 in 1961 (suc­ceed­ed by the Boonesboro Water Association in 1968) and East Clark County Water District in 1967.  The city still pro­vides water for resale to the East Clark County Water District.

In 1979, the Corps of Engineers deter­mined that the two reser­voir dams, dat­ing back to 1891 and 1905, were unsafe, and the Kentucky Division of Water ordered the dams to be replaced.  In 1985, Governor Martha Layne Collins was on hand to ded­i­cate the new $4.5 mil­lion reser­voir dam.  The 65-foot-high dam across the North Fork of Lower Howard’s Creek impound­ed a 90-acre reser­voir.  The plan called for the reser­voir to serve as Winchester’s pri­ma­ry sup­ply of water for the next fifty years.  The expand­ed reser­voir also reduced the need for pump­ing water from the Kentucky River, which was much more expensive.

Industrial devel­op­ment even­tu­al­ly drove the need for an even greater capac­i­ty to deliv­er water.  This led to the con­struc­tion of the Lower Howard’s Creek Water Treatment Plant on Boonesboro Road, which went online in 2021.  The $20 mil­lion treat­ment plant was designed to deliv­er up to nine mil­lion gal­lons of water per day.  The raw water sup­ply comes from Pool No. 10 of the Kentucky River.  Also in 2021, the Kentucky River Authority com­plet­ed an upgrade project at Dam No. 10.

The mod­ern Winchester Municipal Utilities (more com­mon­ly referred to as sim­ply “WMU”) is a sig­nif­i­cant­ly larg­er agency.  With 85 bud­get­ed posi­tions, today’s WMU is respon­si­ble not only for our water sup­ply but also for the waste­water sys­tem (san­i­tary sew­ers) and sol­id waste sys­tem (garbage pick­up and trans­fer station).