The New Well

  We moved from the farm house at county line to the Conklin house at Junction Hill in the winter of '69. It was right beside the "Six-Acres" that Dad already owned and was just down the road from the Junction Hill Pentecostal Church where we attended.
  When we moved in, the only source of water was a cistern.  Let me explain... The house and the barn had gutters that caught the rainwater running off of the roofs.  Then, there was a maze of downspouts and gutters, above the ground, across the yard that carried the water to the cistern.

I couldn't find an example I liked so...I just made one. (OK...I know it's not Rembrandt quality but it will suffice!)

On top of the cistern, there was a filter that all of the water from the gutters ran into.  The filter was a concrete box built on top of the cistern, filled with gravel and sand, with a wooden cover.  Just imagine for a minute, all the things that got washed off of the house and barn, into the gutters, through the downspouts, across the yard in the gutters, then into the filter!  Leaves, grit from the shingles, small sticks and....and...bird poop... spiders... June bugs...LOTS of June bugs!...  The rainwater would filter through all the bugs and bird malarky, through the gravel and sand, and fall into the cistern.  The cistern was a round concrete tank, built into the ground, about eight feet across and fifteen feet deep.  There was a pump in the cistern that pumped the water to the house for drinking, toilets, baths, and such.  How 'bout a nice cold drink of cistern water!?!  As a matter of fact, the water did have a peculiar taste.
  It can get purty dry in the Ozarks during the summer and sometimes the water in the cistern would get low.  When this happened, Dad would call the old "water-hauler", Stanley Mock.  Stanley would pull up in his old truck with the leaky water tank, run the hose down into the cistern, turn on the spigot and fill-'er-up!
  It may have been Dad's plan all along to drill a well or he may have just got tired of drinking "June Bug Juice"!  Because in the summer of 1970, an old Well Driller arrived to drill us a new well.  Now the first thing he did was "witch" a place in our back yard for the water well.  In my recollection, he had a forked stick, shaped like a "Y" to "douse" with.

He took the two upper parts of the "Y" in his hands and started walking around the back yard with the bottom leg of the "Y" held out in front of him.  He walked around the yard between our house and the barn until he came to a spot where the stick started to dip toward the ground.  This was a sure sign of water and that's where they started drilling the well!
  First of all, they set up the drilling rig.  It was an old "pounder" or "pound" type rig (more accurately called a Cable Tool Drill Rig) that drilled by raising a heavy metal "bit" and dropping it over and over, through a piece of pipe casing, into the ground.

The "bit" was attached to a cable that went up through a sheave at the top of the derrick and back down and connected to a large hinged arm called the spudder.  The spudder was connected to a large wheel on the rig engine by a connecting rod that was set so that as the wheel turned, the spudder moved up and down.

  After the rig was set up, the drillers went down into our woods and cut down a bunch of saplings and hauled them back up to the "business" end of the rig.  They then proceeded to build a "brush arbor" to shade them from the sun.  They used some of the larger trees as supports, made a framework for the "roof" of slightly smaller saplings, then piled even smaller saplings with lots of leaves on the top to give them shade.  After drilling for awhile, the sludge or slurry had to be cleaned out of the casing.  This sludge was a result of the rock and dirt that was pounded out by the bit being mixed with water pumped into the casing.  After the bit was pulled out, there was a special pipe called the "bailer" that was lowered down into the casing and removed the sludge and ran it out on the ground. Now my Dad didn't want a big pond of gray soupy sludge in the back yard, so, being the handyman he was, he fixed the problem!  He built a trench out of boards on top of the ground that ran the sludge from the drill rig, down past the clothes line, around the little hill by the barn and under the fence into the barn lot!  No sludge in our yard!
  With all the pounding, the drill bit would get dull.  So...The drillers cleaned out the front part of the little open shed on the end of the barn and set up a blacksmiths shop.

It looked something like this...

They had a portable forge, complete with coal and a bellows.  Then there was an anvil and all the tools needed to sharpen the bits when they were dulled.
  As you can just imagine, this was almost more than a little boy could take in all at once!  The best I can recollect, it took two or three weeks for the well to be drilled.  Day after day...from sunup to late evening...Ka-thud! Ka-thud! Ka-thud!...for hours at a time.  And then...quiet for sludge pumping...or lunch...or driving more casing and then back to Ka-thud! Ka-thud! Ka-thud!
  Finally, the day came when the drillers drilled deep enough and hit a good supply of water.  It was time for the constant pounding to stop, the rig to come down, the blacksmith shop loaded up and the most exciting event of our summer to come to an end!
  Dad built a little concrete wellhouse in the ground around the well casing with a flat piece of concrete covering it.  The well was hooked up to the water lines in the house and for the first time in months, we enjoyed pure-de-ole deep well water!  No more "June Bug Juice" for the Riggs family!