History

The tower was erected ca. 1900 in connection with the construction of the municipal water supply and sewerage network.  

Description

The tower is located to the West from the historic town centre, on a small hill, with its front to I. Paderewskiego street. The form and architectural detail are characteristic of a neo-Gothic style and the upper zone is half-timbered. The tower was set on a square plan and it has massive corners enclosed with buttresses. The pseudo-avant-corps are placed centrally in the body zone. The body of the building is compact, three-storey and covered with a tented roof with a garret and a spire. It is a brick and stone building, with a preserved original roof truss and door frame-woodwork in the western facade. There are single-pass, straight-running, ladder-like stairs. The facades are identical, divided into four zones. The division of the facades does not reflect the inner division into storeys. The first zone, with thicker walls, is accentuated with a protruding shed roof. There are one fault buttresses on the facade’s axis and in the corners. Almost entire zone is filled with ogee-arched portal changing into the shaft of the tower, crowned with step gable in the front facade, two doors in western facade and plastered blind windows. The second zone is a three-axis tower shaft, covered with a plaster layer and vertical brick strips with geometrical ornament (triangular), placed in corners and on the edges of the central pseudo-avant-corps. Window openings are positioned on three levels, in the form of narrow slots with step-like endings, encompassed in surrounds crowned with a round arch. The zone ending with a brick frieze and there is a fault cornice above it. The third zone is divided into two levels with diverse architectural detail. On the axis there is a bay with a width equal to the pseudo-avant-corps in the tower shaft zone. It is a three-axis one, supported by four brick supports, between which there are ogee-arched,  plastered blind windows and a window opening in brick surrounds on the central axis. On both sides of the bay there are plastered plains with ogee-arched windows enclosed in brick surrounds.  There are double cornices above and a brick wall face between them. There are blind windows above them and windows with step-like endings. The whole of it is crowned with a fault cornice. The highest zone is a framework construction with plastered filling, with protruding endings of the wooden ceiling and landing beams. There are narrow windows in the middle of the bay. The garret is in the attic. There is a tented roof with a spire. In part of the ground floor there are welfare facilities. In the interior on a third storey there is a riveted steel tank preserved from the construction time, with a capacity of approximately 350 m³. There are wooden platforms running around it in the upper part.

Limited access to the historic building. User - Chełmża Water and Sewage Company The structure can be viewed from the outside.

Compiled by Kamila Witkowska, National Heritage Board of Poland Regional Branch in Toruń, 26.06.2014.

Bibliography 

• Record sheet of architecture and construction historic buildings, 1998.