This feeling for the 'sublime' was in turn transferred to another fear and awe producing phenomenon: technology. However, as Jean Matthews notes, "most Americans probably regarded nature less as a source of spiritual uplift than as raw material for transformation" (108). This utilitarian view of nature was championed by those proponents of the 'useful arts' and manufacturing. The view of technology (the term was actually re-coined in 1829 by Harvard professor Jacob Bigelow) as a power that could fulfill the inherent greatness of America found its niche in the cities. There, the symbiotic pair of technology and industry offered both the solutions, and causes for a 'disordered' and rapidly changing society.

In some cases, the technological also came to be seen as a threat to the natural; as the mills of the industrial revolution dirtied the air and water, many questioned the wisdom of embracing this new force. Perhaps in response to human fears about the power unleashed by the steam engine and other new marvels, some manufactures sought to 'disguise' their new machines with painted and molded leaves, vines, and flowers, or with architectural motifs. This practice visually linked technology to the natural world, and with the trends such as Greek Revival architecture. And as the historian Roger Kennedy claims, the new Greek buildings occupy the desired pastoral 'middle state' "between corruption (Europe) and savagery (the West)."

Nature

The terms used most often, though with no precise regularity, to describe the pastoral were 'beautiful' and 'picturesque'. Edward Foster in his Civilized Wilderness claims that 'beautiful' was used more often to describe rolling hills, and 'smooth' landscape, while picturesque was used to describe more rocky and irregular landscapes (14). However, even these categorizations are somewhat arbitrary; many writers use them interchangeably, and some such as Andrew Jackson Downing offer more theoretical backing to the terms. In his dichotomy, 'beautiful' suggests 'peace', while picturesque, 'power' (Foster 14). Picturesque also, as its name implies, means 'ordered as in a picture' pointing to the idea of 'concordia discor'--order out of disorder. In this last distinction we can draw a useful line between the idea of the pastoral as something ordered/controlled by man, and the idea of the sublime as beyond human control, and thus both more terrifying, and more inspiring.

The great heirs to these theories of the sublime were the Romantic poets who in turn revised these concepts. M.H. Abrams, following Samuel Monk, notes that Wordsworth conjoined two views of nature in his poetry; the sublime and the beautiful, which existed both symbiotically and antithetically.

By and large the beautiful is small in scale, orderly and tranquil, effects pleasure in the observer, and is associated with love; while the sublime is vast (hence suggestive of infinity), wild, tumultuous, and awful, is associated with pain, and evokes ambivalent feelings of terror and admiration." (Abrams, 98)

 Niagara Falls appears to have functioned as a device for reverie-- a screen which nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans could project their personal explorations of certain collective pre- occupations. Because the meanings of death, nature, and the future, along with related issues pertaining to technology and religion, were themselves topics of much interest and discussion in the nineteenth-century, there is in the Niagara literature an intertextual relation to this larger discussion. (11)

Ideas of the sublime found their greatest 'objective' realization in the massive mountains, waterfalls, and other natural phenomena of America. If there were a competition between indices of the sublime, Europe had nothing that could compete with Niagara Falls. However, Americans were not content with winning the Revolution or the contest for natural splendor--they wanted also to compete in the fields of science, technology, and industry (among other things). This growing interest and emphasis on urban industry shifted the country's focus away from Jeffersonian agrarianism in a decisive, though hardly complete, manner.

Objects of exalted power and grandeur elevate the mind that seriously dwells on them, and impart to it greater compass and strength. Alpine scenery and an embattled ocean deepen contemplation, and give their own sublimity to the conceptions of the beholders. The same will be true of our system of Rail-roads. Its vastness and magnificence will prove communicable, and add to the standard of intellect of our country (195).

Machinery

Tenche Coxe, vice president of the Society for the Encouragement of Useful Arts and Manufactures, and Assistant Treasury Secretary under Hamilton, provides one of the more insistent voices in the late 18th century in favor of improving nature for the benefit of business. His prophetic calls for the primacy of manufacturing align with several other prominent Philadelphian voices.

Strange as it may appear they also card, spin and even weave, it is said by water in the European factories.

Steam mills have not been adopted in America, but we shall probably see them after a short time. . .

The problems with this approach--the exploitation of natural resources to the detriment of the public--is another side of the Water Works' story. The system, at least for a period, was able to tenuously balance public and private needs; a public park, and public water supply benefited the entire city. The site's uniqueness and fame proved a boon to hoteliers and restaurateurs, and the dam that funneled water into the wheel houses also allowed for the passage of barges. However, the same mills that Coxe advocated ultimately destroyed the water quality of the Schuylkill. And through the mid 1800's the city bought plots of land upstream from the works in an attempt to rid the banks of the Schuylkill and the Wissahickon of the many polluting factories. However, in its 'golden age' from the 1820s through the 1850s, the Fairmount Water Works avoided the problem that Fanny Kemble observed in Rochester, where the Genesee had been reduced to a trickle in order to run a multitude of mills: "truly, mills and steam-engines are wonderful things, and I know that man must live; but I wish it were not expedient to destroy what God has made so very beautiful in order to make it useful."

In the early republic, many sought to balance the value of 'usefulness' versus that of 'beauty'. As de Tocqueville noted: "democratic peoples. . .cultivate those arts which help make life comfortable rather than those which adorn it. They habitually put use before beauty, and they want beauty itself to be useful." He seems to be echoing that most practical of Philadelphians, Benjamin Franklin, who claimed "nothing is good or beautiful but in the measure that it is useful." However, as John Kasson has observed, "yet the converse was true as well: American wanted the useful to be beautiful."(142) These feelings applied most obviously to the 'useful arts', the new technologies of the industrial revolution. The same sentiment was used to explain the design of the Centre Square (and Fairmount) Water Works: "This edifice, on account of its conspicuous situation, is designed to be ornamental, as well as useful to the city (Philadelphia, 28)

Americans desired to integrate the new machines into the physical and moral framework of a young nation. One manner in which this ideal was achieved was through design and ornamentation. Thus, new engines, combines, pumps etc., were embellished with 'naturalistic' elements such as vines, flowers, and leaves. Concomitantly, manufactures produced machines decorated with Doric columns or gothic arches. The natural and architectural motifs resonated with landscaping and design trends. However, the 'decorated' machine contrasts with another school of industrial design. As John Kouwenhoven notes in his book Made in America, Americans also created machines in a "vernacular tradition" which merged form and function. He speaks to the practice of small shop inventiveness, of the type of work produced by Philadelphia's Oliver Evans, the designer of one of the Fairmount Water Works' steam engines. However, Kasson complicates the picture by questioning whether this 'tradition' was as popular and democratic as later critics would claim. He finds that the purer forms were championed by the mid 19th century writer, though "manufacturers preferred to display works with a bolder and more overt artistic statement." (Kasson, 155) The division seems to be between the larger manufactures and the inventor; and as the century progressed the former became ascendant.

They also sought to integrate these new, still strange product with both the natural and man-made environments. As Kasson points out, this process was one of both denial and affirmation. Commentators such as Lewis Mumford and Marvin Fisher have sought to explain machine decoration as a denial of the destructive environmental impact that manufacturing had upon the land and landscape--upon the ecosystem and the esthetic value of the 'natural'. "When these machines were brightly painted or garbed in Greek Revival. . .Their invitation to be viewed as works of art became almost irresistible" (Kasson, 161). By placing machines in Greek context, manufacturers responded to a larger movement towards the revival of the forms, ideals, and legacies of that ancient civilization. This movement parallels another trend in which many looked towards "Nature and Progress as surrogates" to history (Kammen, 41). Greek revival complicates this distinction because it acknowledges a particular non-American past. Though when applied to new machinery, the Greek forms do champion 'progress', and a particularly American version of history.

"When I resided in the Athens of America. . . "

                                        -- Gilbert Stuart on Philadelphia

Philadelphia's leader in this trend was the well known banker Nicholas Biddle. In 1811 he assumed control of the journal Port Folio which, in a strongly nationalistic vein, offered a variety of essays on arts, architecture, and financial policy. Biddle's own interest in 'things Greek' had been spawned several years earlier while touring that country. As Kennedy writes: "Young, patriotic, and full of enthusiasm, he saw ancient temples set against a romantic landscape and wrote of them as villas in the Pennsylvania woods" (169). This idealistic musing corresponded with that of those who hoped for newly independent Greece a small revival of its past glory. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1785 that he hoped the Greeks would return to the "classical Models" and "language of Homer" (Kennedy, 168), though he himself had less interest in their architecture than did Biddle's generation.

Biddle was determined to bring to his new country some of the best of the old, despite his intense nationalism. Indeed, he viewed the United States as "more civilized, more moral, more enlightened, and better than any whose exploits have been transmitted by history" (Kennedy, 173). America was better especially than the rival England, who for the past century associated itself more with imperial Rome than democratic Athens. And if we take Kennedy's pronouncement that Greek Revival architecture physically promoted and embodied a revival in American pride, especially after the war of 1812, then Philadelphia was at the center of this renewal. In addition to the Water Works, the city was home to several other Greek Revival gems: Girard College, Biddle's country estate, Andalusia, and the Second Bank of the United States. The use of the Greek style was both an appropriation and declaration of independence; its solid simple lines an affront to the lavish, effete Europe.

Neither Biddle nor Latrobe, who wrote often in the Port Folio, meant to copy the Greeks, but reinterpret them: "The days of Greece may be revived in the woods of America, and Philadelphia become the Athens of the Western World" (Biddle in Kennedy,189).  For Biddle, and perhaps to a lesser extent for Latrobe and his heir to Water Works design, Frederick Graff, the project was as much regional as it was national. Even as the District of Columbia began to sprout neoclassical and Greek revival buildings, Philadelphians sought to expand their intellectual, cultural, and financial capital. The Water Works' new Greek additions speak to this timelessness, their solidity a bulwark against rapid change, both linking America to, and freeing it from, its European past. Nicholas Biddle was quick to proclaim the ascendancy of his country: "There is not a more picturesque or poetic region than our own--Arcadia itself is no more beautiful, nor yet more sonorous than Pennsylvania; and the Thames, or even the Arno, are inspired brooks, by the side of the Hudson or the Schuylkill." (191)

And as Wordsworth spliced the beautiful upon the sublime, so the Water Works conjoin the pastoral with the technological sublime. In doing so, the site gave Philadelphians access to both the pleasant qualities associated with the country and the urban version of the sublime found in American wilderness. The complex presents a pastoral scene-- idyllic river, landscaped gardens, charming neoclassic or country style buildings--at the same time it contains a version of the Locomotive, the massive machinery of the wheels and gears. However, in reading viewers' responses to the works one realizes that the 'beauty' of the site many times outweighed its 'sublime' aspects. The gears by  their hidden nature were less a part of the site, though they did provide a unique addition to the pastoral park. We cannot discount the interest that this machinery held for tourist in the heyday of the Works; artists depicted both the Greek temple exterior, and the machinery inside. The contrast between the two was the point, and the power of the site. And we must recall Simon Pugh's observation that "pastoral pleasure is social, not natural."(148)

Importantly, the mill houses were open to the public who came in great numbers to marvel at the gears and wheels, moving efficiently, noiselessly, and powerfully. In some ways the Greek temples of the water works did function as religious structures. For while the pastoral scene surrounding the houses served as a public meeting place, the sublimely massive water wheels aroused more 'religious' feeling. However, the beauty and terror are at once more obvious and more complex than that exhibited in Marx's locomotive, or by Niagara Falls. In some ways they sublimate the sublime; as mentioned, the technology is hidden, and in some ways secondary to the pastoral. Yet once inside the mill house the charming landscape is left behind; the machine dominates and fascinates. The Works mix the emotions in the way a modern amusement park does; one follows a peaceful monorail or boat ride with the thrill of the roller coaster.

The Works also call into question, in part, the agency of man--for the wheels were powered by the river, and the river tamed by man. This fact speaks of  cooperation with nature; as William Rush's sculpture shows, the Schuykill is liberated, rather than tamed, by the Water Works, and thus liberates humanity. In turn, the site offers a complex commentary in the ways that Nature could be useful to Man: as a respite from the city, as a provider of water, as an aesthetic tableau, as outlet for ( as well as inducer of) excess energies and passions, and as finally as a provider of material wealth.

In some ways the Works also predicts in a curious way later attempts to harness the power of Niagara Falls, and to surround that sublime nature with a landscaped park. Though vague ideas of harnessing the power of the Falls, or to make them a center of a great industrial metropolis, it was not until the end of the 1896 that they could be harnessed for power generation. And in the 1880s Frederick Law Olmsted planned a version of his Central Park for Niagara. While no exact cause and effect can be drawn, it is notable that the Water Works successfully (though on a more modest scale, and only for a time) enacted that merger of the sublime and the pastoral, the practical and the whimsical, that Niagara's planners had been seeking. As we shall see in the next paean, the Water Works combined beauty and utility magnificently.

Of the many accounts published in the 'Golden Age' of the Waterworks, Caroline Gilman's delves most vigorously into all of the issues thus far presented. From her The Poetry of Traveling in the United States

I visited Fair Mount, and rejoiced like another Undine in its waterfalls and fountains, and felt how the river was like God's spirit, spreading somewhere at first in unattainable beauty, then carried through the dark channels of human life, seemingly lost until man inquires and strives for it, and then breaking out in new modifications, pouring its blessings on all who ask, and they are glad.

I am grateful for beauty in all its forms. Had I been carried blindfolded to the machinery at Fair Mount, and then permitted to behold it alone, I should have been agreeably excited by its singular combination of simplicity and power; its wheels would have rolled on a while in my memory, I should have paid the usual tribute of wonder to man's ingenuity, and have dreamt of those iron arms that seem so human in their operations; but now that I have gazed on the placid river, marked the shaded green of its beautiful borders, seen the sculptured images awakening graceful associations, stood by the clear basin and felt a longing like a youth to rush in and stand under its showery fountain, heard the roar of the giant Art contending with and counteracting the giant Nature, climbed the precipitous eminence, and watched the setting sun throwing his golden smile on all, this leaves a deeper stamp--the stamp of the beautiful. . ..(32)