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| (photo source - The National Humane Review – April 1917) original copyright expired |
With a lot
of Victorian charity for humane treatment of animals, came a lot of buying
and installing drinking fountains for horses in the cities of late nineteenth
and early twentieth century America. With this came a new hazard, the spread of disease
among animals drinking in these fountains.
A lot of these stone horse
troughs were built by monument makers for cemeteries or granite workers and their businesses – some of these same businesses such as John M. Gessler’s Sons
of Philadelphia.
“Glanders is
a contagious and fatal disease of horses, donkeys, and mules, and is caused by
infection from certain bacterium.”
Once the
problem was identified, fountains were closed for a couple summers until a new
sanitary method of delivering water came into being, with the flow of street pressured water from the bottom up into individual cups for
the horses to drink and the overflow traveling out over the ever filling cup reservoirs
going back down drains by gravity.
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