Nature and the City: Philadelphia: Home

Note this searches both the Ordinances (municipal orders) and the Council minutes. The two had related but different functions. Try adding "fairmount park" to the end of the search string. Browse through the results by date to identify interesting results.

Click on "Advanced Search." Do an author search for "Annual report of the Chief Engineer of the Water Department of the City of Philadelphia" and a full text search for "fairmount park." Note that each report has both a statistical and a textual section.

This is a collection of hundreds of American magazines running through the 19th century. Try searching for Fairmount and "water works" and browsing through the results. Note how the nature of the publication--trade magazines or more popular works, for example--relate to the contents of the articles.

HathiTrust is similar to Google Books except that it is better organized and doesn't provide snippets of material still in copyright. Try searching for popular texts of the time such as guidebooks and illustrated works.

Use the viewer to see maps of the Fairmount Park area as portrayed in different periods of time