Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [28]
Chapter 4
THE CRADLE OF THE SACO
THE FRYEBURG WATER Company has supplied the village of Fryeburg since 1883, at first from brooks that spill down a small mountain north of town, and then from a spring that bubbles in the woods between Portland Street and Lovewell Pond. “I put in a perforated pipe that led to a baffle pipe that went into a pot,” Hugh Hastings, president of the water company, tells me when I stop in to get his side of the story after I’d visited Howard Dearborn. The system was a bit crude, but it worked from 1955 to 1995.
Hastings is eighty years old, with a crevassed face and slicked-back silvered hair. Wearing a dark Windbreaker, he sits behind a cluttered desk in a small storefront—the water company headquarters. Gold wall-to-wall carpeting and venetian blinds give the office a dusty sepia aspect, and family photos decorate the plywood walls. If the decor is meant to imply no one is making a killing by selling water, it succeeds royally.
Privately owned, the Fryeburg Water Company has been in the hands of a few local families since its founding and currently has thirty-three shareholders. Roughly half of them are related to the Hastings family, and Hugh’s son John, the company’s superintendent, holds the most shares. In itself, the ownership arrangement isn’t unusual: private water companies were the norm in the United States throughout the nineteenth century, but as cities grew and health issues intensified, local governments stepped in. According to the National Association of Water Companies, the proportion of water services in the United States provided by private companies—whether measured by customers served or volume of water handled—has remained close to 15 percent since World War II.
I glance around the room and note, taped to a filing cabinet across the room, a Ben Franklin quote: “When the well runs dry, we shall know the value of water.” In fact, Fryeburg’s well did run dry a few years previously, and since then the townsfolk have learned more than they ever wanted about the value of the stuff that bubbles from their stratified soils. It all started back in 1995, when the state told Hastings that, due to new drinking-water regulations, he could no longer collect water from that baffle pipe and pot. The company could either build an expensive filtration system, or it could dig a borehole. Hastings called in a hydrogeologist named Eric Carlson, who worked at a fancy-pants engineering firm in Portland.
Over the years he’d been working in Maine, Carlson told me earlier, he’d “learned where all the water was.” He’d seen the water trucks rolling through the state, and he had a pretty good sense of water quality in this area. Carlson has blue eyes that twinkle over high cheekbones, wavy, graying hair, and teeth so evenly gapped they look as if they’ve been machined. Together with Hastings, in 1995, Carlson had walked into the woods off Portland Street to take a look at the water company’s spring site. “Hugh said the soil around here would be all clay,” Carlson said. “He got out his excavator and he started to dig some holes.” And what did he find? “Lots of sand.” Sand was good: sand was a filter. The water kept bubbling up, and at a rate that told Carlson there was more than enough for the town. “That’s when I had an idea,” he said. “Why not start a facility and sell bulk water?” He turned to Hastings and said, “Let’s go into business.”
Carlson built borehole number one for the Fryeburg Water Company, as he’d been contracted to do. Then, after Hastings got permission to travel through Howard Dearborn’s woods, Carlson dug borehole number two as a backup, not far from the first. Then, with his new partner, John Hastings (Hugh’s son, that is), he formed a company called Pure Mountain Springs and started purchasing tankerloads of Wards Brook water, at regular residential rates, from the Fryeburg Water Company. Pure Mountain Springs then turned around and sold that water, at an undisclosed commercial rate, to Poland Spring. The operation started small, taking just eight