Lawrence Experiment Station
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The Lawrence Experiment Station, now known as the Senator William X. Wall Experiment Station, was the world's first trial station for drinking water purification and sewage treatment. It was constructed in 1887 at 37 Shattuck Street, Lawrence, Massachusetts, and is now on the List of historic civil engineering landmarks.
Lawrence Station was established by the Massachusetts State Board of Health, based on the earlier work of scientists William Thompson Sedgwick and Theobald Smith who understood the linkage of water-borne germs to specific diseases. In 1886 the Massachusetts legislature required its Board of Health to adopt water pollution standards, which led to creation of the station under the direction of Hiram Francis Mills, the "Father of American Sanitary Engineering". MIT professors William Ripley Nichols, Ellen Swallow Richards, and Thomas Messinger Drown also played important early roles.
In those first days, the station's main mission was to develop practical methods for treating wastewater. Its first task as to determine the effect of filtration as compared to natural oxidation, which it decided by experiments in its chemistry laboratory. During this time, Sedgwick and students invented techniques for identifying and quantitatively analyzing the microorganisms in water and sewage. These studies helped set the standards in Massachusetts, other states, and other countries.
A bacteriological laboratory was added two years later. In 1893 when a typhoid epidemic (Salmonella typhi) arose along the Merrimack River, the City of Lawrence began filtration of river water using Mills' slow sand filters, thus becoming the first American city to filter its water for disease prevention. This filtering led to marked reductions in typhoid fever rate and overall death rate in the city.
