The Washington Swimming Pool

The Washington swimming pool as it looked before its renovation in 1970. The pool was built in 1936 as part of the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency to produce public works projects, at a cost of nearly $46,000, around $38,000 of which came from federal funding. W.G. Riester was the superintendent of WPA projects in Washington, and John H. Kretz was tapped to oversee construction and engineering of the new pool. The WPA pool was actually the second pool in Washington; a pool owned by James Matthews had been built on Railroad Street in 1908 but had gone out of business by 1912 due to a lack of patronage.