National Humane Alliance Fountain

Derby and Horses… Not in Kentucky
National Humane Alliance Fountain, Derby
December 2024

There are websites dedicated to locating and writing about all the statuary and memorials and plaques in Connecticut. I love those sites! This is not one of those sites.

There is one website dedicated to locating and writing about every single National Humane Alliance Fountain that ever existed in the US and Mexico. That site happens to have all grown from this particular National Humane Alliance Fountain in Derby. I don’t know how or why that happened, but it did, and people reference the Derby Fountain page as the National Humane Alliance Fountain resource.

Lucky me, as now I can just hit up the locals for info about this charming, yet not altogether exciting, water fountain. It’s not one-of-a-kind but there’s only one in Connecticut, and its original intent is pretty neat. It is located off of Division Street at the Ansonia line in the middle of the Derby Greenway which is a section of the Naugatuck River Greenway.

Okay. Cool. So what is it and why does it rise to the level of CTMQdom?

The National Humane Alliance fountains are a series of granite drinking fountains that were intended to provide fresh drinking water for horses, dogs, cats, and people. About 125 of the fountains were donated to cities throughout the United States and Mexico between 1902 and 1915. Most of the fountains have been removed from their original sites, usually in the center of busy intersections, but at least 70 of them are still publicly viewable.

The NHA was founded in 1897 by Hermon Lee Ensign, a philanthropist and animal welfare advocate who had amassed a fortune in the advertising business. When he died in 1899, he left much of his wealth to build animal drinking fountains for any city that requested one. The fountains were provided free of charge as long as the city provided an appropriate site, water supply, and maintenance. The fountains were produced in Vinalhaven, Maine by the Bodwell Granite Company, the same company that supplied the stone blocks for the Brooklyn Bridge.

The fountains’ original use became obsolete not long after they were installed as motor vehicles replaced horses in urban areas. Mostly located in busy intersections, the fountains became traffic hazards and many of them were removed to parks or other quieter locations. The Derby fountain has been moved a few times from what I can tell – eventually ending up in its current location in 2007.

This thing weighs five tons. The large bowl is six foot across and the fountain is over six feet tall. At the base, there are are four small water bowls for dogs, cats and other animals.

The Alliance only lasted a few years, and Ensign’s original ideas are all but absent in today’s America – things like empathy, caring, humanity. Oh well, at least we still have one of his fountains in Derby.

A lot of the above is from the Electronic Valley site.