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Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered. In 2017, a utility worker sunk a

backhoe into the ground on a Philadelphia street. It was a pretty normal thing to do. It was

replacing some old cast iron piping. Then things got really weird. Along came a tree expert,

an arborist riding paths on her bicycle. Julie Snell was her name. She spotted something odd about some wood the worker had unearthed, and she

leveled her expert opinion with the water department, which was, quote, that didn't look like a normal tree.

It sure wasn't.

The worker had unknowingly unearthed an incredible piece of Philadelphia's history.

A 19th century water system made almost entirely of wood.

A timber-based pipe network that for a few years made Philadelphia a leader in sanitation technology. The sanitation system came to be in late 1811. Philadelphia was gearing up with the

rest of the country to go to war with Britain for a second time. The city was a center of art

and engineering, and a work gang on Spruce Street began installing the water main of a new sanitation system crafted out of hollow tree trunks.

Each section came from a 10-foot pine log.

The system had been designed by Benjamin La Trobe, the architect of the U.S. Capitol building. The Philly

system used two steam engines to pump water from the Schuylkill River up to the center

square waterworks. Gravity then shot the water through a wooden pipe network. At its height,

that pipe network eventually grew to more than 45 miles in length.

The system was a huge upgrade for Philadelphia and represented the spirit of American ingenuity.

Sure, the water tasted slightly woody, but it worked.

Before the system was installed, residents relied on household wells that often shared the yard space with the family home.

But now, residents could either fill their buckets for free at a public stamp pipe or pay $5 a year to connect directly to faucets in their yards or kitchens.

The system also made it possible to regularly flush the streets of horse poop and rotting garbage.

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