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This story originally appeared in the Sunday, January 16 print edition of The News-Times. Click here to subscribe.

DANBURY — Sewer treatment and water lines might not seem the makings of an adventure story.

Yet the history behind what most city residents take for granted — running water and sewage disposal — dates back to the Civil War and includes heroes and villains, tragedy and triumph, and even a one-of-a-kind legal saga.

“It’s a fascinating topic,” said Brigid Guertin, executive director of the Danbury Museum & Historical Society, about the early plans and struggles that came with building an infrastructure suitable for the hatting capital.

In this story, the heroes are the ingenious Yankee pioneers, civic and town leaders, who as early as 1834 wanted to create a water system adequate for home use, fire safety and future commercial purposes.

The first water lines — some made of wood, cement and wrought iron — were not built until 1860, when about nine miles of pipe were laid from the lower Kohanza Reservoir and dam that held 40 million gallons of water just three miles from the town center, according to local history books and “The Danbury Times.”

By the following year, the water system that history books say was greeted with “rejoicing” served 91 families, seven hat factories, 11 stores, a gas company, a dye house, a jail, a livery stable and three churches.

Five years later, the city needed even more water as the population and commerce doubled. A second reservoir, the 30-acre upper Kohanza, was built with an earthen dam that was about 90 to 100 feet thick.

All was well until Jan. 31, 1869, when the upper Kohanza Reservoir dam collapsed, releasing torrents of water, ice masses, trees and debris into the downtown streets, killing 11 people in a half-hour as it destroyed homes, bridges and factories.

Historical and newspaper accounts, including Harper’s Weekly, described the destruction as a “disaster, calamity, strange, appalling and fatal.”

One of the accounts describes how the body of one woman was found a day later frozen to a tree, a half-mile from the house she escaped.

“That was horrifying,” Guertin said of the disaster.

And the timing was precipitous, as it coincided with Danbury becoming renowned as a booming manufacturing center, Guertin and other historians noted.

Again, though, the reservoirs’ importance to the city prompted work crews to rebuild them within six months, said historian Bill Devlin.Today, the city of Danbury boasts eight reservoirs, some still with earthen dams inspected annually to assure such a catastrophic piece of history is never repeated, said historians and town officials.

From his research back to the late 1920s, Danbury Public Utilities Superintendent David Day said the city relied on reservoirs and pipes to manage the hatting industry’s demand for as much as 7 million gallons of water a day. He said today’s average use without manufacturing is a similar amount.

“If it hadn’t been for the hatting industry, I don’t know what we’d have today,” Day said, noting none of the original wooden piping exists today; some turn of the century iron pipes do still exist. “We’re fortunate to have the system we have in place.”

Now, for the villains in this story. Well, those are the folks who, either due to apathy or avarice, opted to ignore the implications of dumping untreated sewage into the Still River.

In the early 1880s, the Danbury borough around Main Street was becoming overcrowded, and the town’s physicians and others were concerned about public health. In 1888, the state Board of Health condemned the borough’s sanitary conditions, with town residents annually suffering from typhoid fever and cholera epidemics, Devlin said.

So sewers were built in the city center with discharge into the Still River, Devlin writes in his historical account titled “We Crown Them All.”

This practice may not have seemed vile to city leaders at the time, because for decades before sewers the hat factories were depositing their acids, dyes and fur wastes into the river, he said.

But the true reason that sewage treatment was not welcomed was all about cost, Devlin said.

In those days, there were no federal and state dollars for such infrastructure projects, and so the burden was totally on the citizenry and commerce leaders. No one welcomed spending $150,000 to $200,000 to build a treatment plant.

Yet the Beaver Brook residents’ and mill owners’ health and economic livelihood was threatened by the raw sewage that emitted foul odors and ruined crops.

In 1893, grist mill owner George Morgan sued the city; he was quickly joined by others in the Still River valley and the town of Brookfield.

The city tried to mitigate the problem by spending $10,000 to build a disinfection plant in 1894, but that only operated in the summer and did not absolve the concerns of those in that area.

Come February 1895, the civil case of Morgan vs. Danbury opened in Superior Court in Bridgeport. In August, the judge ruled that the city had just 20 months to stop polluting Morgan’s land and build a filtration plant.

The landmark judgement was hailed as the “broadest injunction of its kind ever granted in the United States at that time,” Devlin wrote.

Today, the Still River is a recreational beauty, historians suggest.

Stay tuned. This story could become an action thriller.

“Out of adversity comes progress,” Guertin concluded.