The Wooden Pipe Experiment
A Dayton businessman brings a water-main success story to the Walla Walla council.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
S. S. Moritz, a business man of Dayton, was in the city today conferring with members of the council water committee regarding the water subject. Mr. Moritz is an enthusiastic advocate of the use of wooden pipes for mains and he gave the committee much information about it today. 'It has been clearly demonstrated in Dayton that the wooden water pipe is the best that can be used,' said Mr. Moritz this morning. 'In Dayton the city had been using steel pipe for many years and was continually having trouble with it. Almost every day it would break and have to be replaced with new pipe. This meant the outlay of considerable money for repairs and it became so expensive that it would have bankrupted the city in a very short time. Last fall the council decided that it would experiment with wooden pipe. About 2,500 feet was procured from Tacoma to replace some of the worst steel mains in the business portion of the city. It has proven highly satisfactory and the city has decided that as fast as the old pipe becomes unfit for use to dig it up and replace it with the wooden pipe.'
“It became so expensive that it would have bankrupted the city in a very short time.”
While plastic and PEX are standard today, early 20th-century municipalities frequently turned to hollowed-out log or wooden stave pipes as a cost-effective, durable solution to replace failing iron or steel. This story reflects a classic municipal struggle: the constant, expensive battle against infrastructure decay.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.