This blog post is by Jessica Fries-Gaither, a 2024-2025 Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow at the Library of Congress. It is one in a series exploring how to analyze primary sources through the three-dimensions of the National Research Council’s “A Framework for K-12 Science Education” and the Next Generation Science Standards.
How clean is your water? This question has not always been top of mind.
Ellen H. Swallow Richards (1842-1911), one of America’s first female professional chemists, was a pioneer in the field of sanitary engineering, the practice of using engineering to remove and dispose of waste to preserve water quality.
Richards’s achievements in sanitary engineering began with a large-scale sewage treatment research project with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1883. Several years later, she and her assistants surveyed the quality of Massachusetts’s bodies of water to determine to what extent they were polluted with industrial waste and municipal sewage. Her work led to the development of the first state water-quality standards in the United States as well as the building of the first modern municipal sewage treatment plant in Lowell, Massachusetts. She served as official water analyst for the State Board of Health and taught at MIT.
Her protocols and findings are documented in several volumes, including Conservation by Sanitation: Air and Water Supply; Disposal of Waste [Including a Laboratory Guide for Sanitary Engineers]. One case study presented in this book is a water analysis conducted in Blackstone Valley, Massachusetts. In a map, data table, and accompanying text, Richards analyzes the effects of human activities on water quality and discusses how those negative effects might be mitigated. Analyzing these documents with a three-dimensional lens can lead students to consider human impacts on earth systems, science and engineering practices related to the collection, analysis, and use of data, and cross-cutting concepts like patterns, cause and effect, and systems.

Share the map and data table with students and invite them to look closely. What do they notice? What questions do they have?
After a preliminary analysis, focus students using guiding questions with a three-dimensional lens. If needed, provide the context that Richards was a chemist studying water quality and pollution. You might locate the town Worcester on the map and guide students to match the testing locations on the map with the data from the table if they haven’t already done so.
Disciplinary Core Ideas
- What was Richards’s purpose in creating these two documents?
- What information do these two documents tell us?
- Why is it important to have both the map and the data table?
Science and Engineering Practices
- Which science and engineering practices might Richards have used to create these two documents?
- How do the map and data table work together to reveal new information?
- What might Richards have done with the information she learned from these documents?
Cross-Cutting Concepts
- Do you notice any patterns when you look at the data alongside the map?
- Which other cross-cutting concepts might Richards have been thinking about as she created and studied these documents?
Learning about Ellen H. Swallow Richards’s influential work in sanitary engineering might inspire students to conduct their own water quality tests, either on the water in their homes and schools or in natural bodies of water. How do their findings compare to Richards’s?
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Comments (2)
Thank You for this invaluable historic information!
Thanks.Quite informative