Over the next decades the drinking fountain movement gained momentum, not to mention ornamental ambition. In the late 1880s, Henry D. Cogswell, a dentist from New England who’d gotten rich in California during the Gold Rush, allied himself with a local group called the Moderation Society and funded two elaborate “temperance fountains” in New York, one in Tompkins Square Park and another in front of the main post office at Eighth Avenue and 34th Street. In his lifetime the zealous Cogswell would sponsor almost 50 similar fountains in cities from Boston to San Francisco. His energetic example inspired philanthropists around the country, including Simon Benson, who made a fortune in the logging industry in Oregon and funded the installation of a series of fountain in downtown Portland; designed by local architect A.E. Doyle, many of these now iconic four-bowl “Benson Bubblers” are still in use.
Victorian fountain reformers often aligned with other contemporaneous movements. One of the first actions of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which was founded in 1866, was to install horse troughs throughout New York City. Around that time the MFDFA, in London, recognized the potential for cross-species charity and transformed itself into the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association. Soon Philadelphia formed its own Fountain Society to supply fountains and troughs throughout the city, and numerous other municipalities saw the proliferation of multi-species fountains that accommodated the thirst of people, horses, dogs, cats, and birds.
Some of these fountains, public things subject to contestation, were received warily by citizens who objected to the aesthetics of their designs or the moralizing of their benefactors, or both. Cogswell’s fountains, many of which he designed himself, and some of which incorporated his own likeness, were often ridiculed for their pomposity. “Weeding Out Bad Sculpture” ran the headline of a New York Times article in March 1894, which then stated bluntly: “The Cogswell fountains are first to go.” 26 A Cogswell gift to Dubuque, Iowa, proved so unpopular it was taken down and carted away; another, in Rockville, Connecticut, was thrown into a lake. As historian Howard Malchow writes, such vandalism was to some extent “a protest against the intrusion of middle-class temperance moralizing and religiosity, and a physical attack on the symbols of wealth, ostentation, and charity.” 27
