On November 10, 1832, the joint committee on tire and water of the New York City common council engaged Colonel De Witt Clinton, a competent engineer, to examine the various sources and routes of water supply which had been suggested up to that time, and to make a careful report on the subject. Colonel Clinton recommended the Croton watershed as the source of supply, and demonstrated by unanswerable facts that no other source adequate to the ultimate needs of the city was available. This report marks the beginning, as a serious undertaking, of the project to conduct the Croton water to the city. The history of New York's water supply is the subject of a monumental work by Mr. Edward Wegmann (published in 1896), in which all the details of the earlier makeshift systems and schemes, and of the construction of both the old and the new aqueducts and the Bronx River conduit, with their associated dams, reservoirs, and other works in this county, Putnam, and New York City, are described.1 We shall briefly summarize this history, so far as its particulars are apropos to our narrative, down to the period of the completion of the first aqueduct, reserving notice of the later works for the proper chronological sequence. It is of interest that in July, 1774, a proposal made by Christopher Colics to erect a reservoir, pump water into it from wells, and convey the water through the several streets of the city in pipes, Avas adopted by the authorities of New York; ami that land for the purpose of a reservoir on Great George Street, owned by Augustus Van Cortlandt and Erederick Van Cortlandt, of the Van Cortlandt family of our county, was purchased and works were built and put in operation. The Revolutionary War interfered with the development 1 Another work of great authority (exelu- (1843).