I remember it like it was yesterday, a moment caught in time. I was nine years old.
It was a cool, sunny day in spring. Dad was standing beside the old well, the sun at his back, creating a halo effect around him.
He was shirtless, wearing only a pair of muddy jeans and work shoes, holding an old bucket with a rope attached to it.
We had just moved to the Millersburg property, which was my mother’s childhood home. The only available water source was the old shallow well. We lived too far out in the country, so city water wasn’t available.
The well hadn’t been used in nearly twenty years, since my grandmother moved into the city.
Dad knew he had to clean the well and purify the water to make it safe before we had any usable fresh water at all.
The well was hand-dug and approximately thirty-five feet deep. The sides and bottom were dirt, so the bottom of it was muddy.
Dad repeatedly climbed down the ladder he had placed in the well, and brought up the mud bucket by bucket.
He brought up other things, too: an old bucket and a wrench that had been lost down there many years before.
After Dad cleaned the well, he began lining it with reclaimed bricks.
I know the weather was still cool because Mom had been cleaning the bricks with a wire brush and water they brought up beforehand. I remember her mentioning how cold her hands were, and I also remember how red they were.
Once the brick lining was finished, Dad treated the water to make sure it was safe to drink. He said he put lime down the well to purify it, which is how they did it back then.
When that was all done, the last step was to restore the hand pump, which he had pulled out of the well before he started cleaning it.
After cleaning it, he replaced the leathers, applied a fresh coat of red paint, and reinstalled it when the paint was dry.
For several years afterward, before Dad built the new house, we had to go out to the well, pump the water we needed, and carry it into the house.
At age nine, I wasn’t strong enough to carry a full bucket of water, so the job mostly fell to Mom and Monty. Sometimes Mom was busy and Monty was off carrying his paper route, so Mom would ask me to bring in a half bucket. Once in a while, if she needed more, I had to make two trips.
I remember hanging the bucket on the pump spout, having to pump it three or four times to prime it, the squeak the pump made, and the clatter of metal on metal as I brought the handle down and it hit the pump body.
Later, when Dad built the new house, he installed a jet pump in the basement and connected it to the well. After that, we did not use the hand pump nearly as often.
Even so, Dad—and later Carl—kept the hand pump in good working order.
Dad’s reasoning was simple:
A family’s source of water should not depend entirely upon electricity if another choice exists.
