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Autograph letter, signed. 3 pages plus integral address leaf.

To Boston Mayor Josiah Quincy. When future Harvard President Josiah Quincy was elected Mayor of Boston in 1823, determined to organize an efficient city Fire Department, he sent a local businessman to New York and Philadelphia to study the fire-fighting experience of those cities. Reading about this mission in the newspaper, the writer of this letter, a Connecticut Yankee working on Long Island, sent this lengthy letter to Quincy suggesting a fire-fighting system far superior to water-carrying “Engines all huddling together around a fire” until their tanks ran dry. A less expensive and more effective system would be to tap “the most inexhaustible fountains of water” by powerful “forcing pumps” to direct water “into Lead Aqueduct pipes laid deep underground and leading into every part of the city…at every convenient place have spouts run up from the principal pipes to the surface…” where the water could be accessed through locked iron covers – what we now call fire hydrants. The writer concluded, “Should you be so far assured of the practicability of my plan that you might wish to have one of the kind erected I would engage to do it. I require no recompense therefore if I failed to make it work to perfection…” While the signature to this ingenious plan has been obscured, a smudged docketing note identifies him as Solon Robertson or Robinson and the handwriting strongly resembles that of famed writer and journalist Solon Robinson (1803-1880) an Indiana pioneer who as agricultural columnist for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune became the leading American authority on all matters agricultural before the Civil War. Amazingly, in 1825, that Solon Robinson was only 21 years old. A 2-volume biography of Robinson published by the Indiana Historical Bureau (1936) confesses that the “meager” information about his early life confirmed only that he was living in Connecticut,  trained as a carpenter and possibly working as a “Yankee peddler” before he “wandered West” to Cincinnati and finally settled among Indians and settlers in the Indiana woods There is no mention of fire-fighting among the vast and varied interests of Robinson’s later life. But whether or not he was indeed the writer, the plan detailed in this letter represented an historically significant use of early American technology.