Kansas Well Cleaning

Not me!

Traffic up and down the street was regular and loud. A lot of commercial vehicles use this route to somewhere and sometimes conversation is difficult.

I didn't even hear Frank as he climbed up to join me on the front porch.

From one subject to another, we settled on the water system used in his childhood home in the western part of the county.

In rural Kansas where I sit today, the place is over-supplied with derelict windmills that were once used to pump water for families and livestock. Today the steel towers stand sentinel to mark old home places and barns.

Some of the towers, or part of them, are all that remain, the blades rusted loose long ago.

Kansas is blessed with reliable supply of wind. Frank said their wind-powered pump delivered water to a tank then into the house by gravity.

His family had running water but used an outhouse.

In the south, private bored water wells are measured in hundreds of feet. In Frank’s memory, the family well was about twenty-five feet deep.

Today we would call that a “ground water well.”

Hand dug wells were usually about three feet in diameter, with the walls “cased” with rock. Periodic cleaning was required. Another job done by hand.

Today we have restrictive child labor laws, and I doubt they would permit a kid to follow his daddy down a ladder into a hole in the ground and clean out a well: Frank did.

The ladder went into the well and they followed it.

He and his daddy cleaned out the mud, muck, dead frogs and whatever had found its way to the bottom. His brothers hauled the bucket to the top with a rope.

Scoop top soil away and the earth here contains layers of sandstone of various densities for about as deep as you want to dig.

Sandstone is so abundant that it was used as a building material. Many homes and barns were built of sandstone, and there are still some stone fence posts.

Later I was still chewing on Frank's story about the well cleaning and just couldn’t turn it loose.

There are still people who dig graves by hand and often clean out dug wells as a side hustle. They know how to deal with the danger of gasses in a well or the walls falling in.

I think trying to rehab an old family well is a noble job, but it needs the help of a professional. I'm not a good candidate for climbing down in a hole in the ground, but I wish you luck.

joenphillips@yahoo.com