Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering

Marston Water Tower Named American Water Landmark

Contacts:
Dana Schmidt, CCEE communications specialist, (515) 294-3071
Jim Cable, CCEE associate professor, jkcableiastate.edu

Ames, Iowa – The American Water Works Association (AWWA) has named the Marston Water Tower on the Iowa State University campus an American Water Landmark. Dale Acheson, past chair of the AWWA's Iowa chapter and superintendent of Urbandale Water Utility, presented the award last Friday at a ceremony honoring the design and construction of the water tower. The award recognizes American water landmarks at least 50 years old that have had a direct and significant relationship with water's supply, treatment, distribution, or technological development.

The Marston Water Tower was built in 1897 to provide a water supply to Iowa State University. The tower was the first steel tower built west of the Mississippi River.

In his 1897 Engineers Report on Waterworks, Anson Marston, the tower's namesake and Iowa State's first dean of engineering, says constructing the tower was necessary because the method previously used for distributing water on campus was no longer sufficient. In fact, the university closed the campus for two weeks in 1895 "on account of lack of water, and by two or three fires, which had to be extinguished by the primitive method of carrying water in buckets."

The completed tower, which cost $10,281.31 to build, stands 168 feet tall and can hold 162,000 gallons of water. The tower supplied water to the Iowa State campus for nearly 80 years, until the university was connected to the Ames water system in 1978. In the 1980s, the university had planned to tear down the tower, but Iowa state alumnus Sam Hamilton and the College of Engineering's career services director Mary Thompson, along with Jim Cable, associate professor of civil, construction, and environmental engineering (CCEE) and a large number of CCEE alumni, persuaded university officials to restore the landmark.

Today, the tower is on the National Register of Historic Places. It is the tallest structure on campus.

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