Volunteers Kim Smart and Barbara Beaman led a dozen or so participants to the Riverside site of the abandoned reservoir and waterworks that served the city's needs from 1887 until 1927.

The stone remnants of two old dams and a pump house are still visible. They fell into disuse and decay after the city opened a new reservoir at Lake Michie in 1926.

Civic leaders of the time developed the Eno pump station and its associated reservoir in response to some hard-won experience, said Ed Harrison, a Durham County resident and Chapel Hill town councilman.

"In downtown Durham, the oldest building you see is from 1911," he said. "There was a major fire in the 1880s. That's when they discovered they needed a dependable source of water."

Sunday's hike also highlighted the community's changing attitudes toward the Eno River itself.

Environmental fight

The old reservoir was built on a tributary of the River because people at the time thought the River was too polluted to serve as a source of drinking water. The Eno's water-quality problems stemmed from sewage flowing downstream from Hillsborough and the industry located there, Beaman said.

But the River's future became the focus of one of the area's first major environmental battles when the city considered building a reservoir on the Eno itself. Activists led by the Association's future president, Margaret Nygard, banded together to convince officials to look elsewhere and create a park along the River instead.

The Eno reservoir "was the first major public works project in Durham that ever got stopped," Harrison said.

Nature put on a show too during Sunday's hike. Participants stopped frequently to examine small flowers growing on the side of the path, including samples of trout lily, yellow buckeye and quaker lady.

Not all of the plants they spotted merited close examination. "Here's a vine you need to remember," Beaman said at one stop, pointing to a crawler with some hairy appendages. "It's poison ivy."

The walkers' appreciation of the area's wildlife wasn't limited to its plants. At one point, a backup on the trail ensued when the hikers at the head of the line stopped for a minute to look off into the woods.

"What are we looking at?" came a query from the back of the line.