Workers of Wachusett, 1896‑1906

Virtual Tour

The Metropolitan Waterworks Museum is pleased to announce the opening of Workers of Wachusett, 1896-1906, the new exhibit in the Overlook Gallery at the Waterworks Museum. The exhibit will be on display through the spring of 2019.

The show vividly documents the grueling practices and harsh living conditions of the migrant and immigrant laborers who toiled on this massive late 19^th century public works project in central Massachusetts. The project involved clearing more than 4,000 acres of land to construct a reservoir with 37 miles of shoreline, building a 200-foot-high masonry dam and 27 linear miles of tunnel, impounding sixty-five billion gallons of water and completing the transformation of the Boston’s water supply into a broader regional network: the Metropolitan Waterworks.

The photographs on display, enlarged from the original plate glass negatives, are a selection of the more than 6,000 taken by a team of photographers employed by the Metropolitan Water Commission, which managed the infrastructure project, to document this expansion of greater Boston’s water supply by harnessing the waters of the Nashua River. Come and view these amazingly clear and revealing images of the thousands of workers, predominantly the newly-arrived Italian immigrants and African-American migrants, as they excavated and cleared the land, tunneled through soil and rock, quarried stone and built dikes, a reservoir, a dam and an aqueduct. The exhibit also features the shanty-towns and primitive shacks where the workers were segregated from the local inhabitants, and controlled by an exploitative boss-system of patronage.

The exhibit is designed to appeal to visitors of all ages and there are accompanying interactive materials that will engage and educate both children and adults.