The House Well

     Two things would cause the sky to fall at our house when I was a kid.  You must be pretty close to the dinner table at twelve noon.  If you weren’t, you would hear about it.

     If there was no water in the kitchen or bathroom, everything came to a halt.  Diagnosing and healing the waterworks took priority.      

     The pasture well only malfunctioned during the warm months when the cattle were in the pasture.  The house well could go haywire anytime, summer or winter.  The pasture waterworks were fairly simple, needing no pressure other than gravity.  The house water was much more complicated.

    In the first place the well supplying water for the house is four or five hundred yards from the house, quite a distance to pump and pipe water using only wind power.  Second, some pressure was required to get water to flow from kitchen and bath faucets.

     Historically,the “tank house” supplied the pressure using gravity.  The tank would be housed in a tower of sorts, about twelve or fifteen feet above the ground.  The tower and tank had to be housed to keep water from freezing in the winter.  The windmill would raise the water and dump it into the top of the tank.  Usually the tank house would be built right beside the well and windmill.    

      A pipe ran from the bottom of the tank and had to be buried about three feet beneath ground level to prevent it from freezing.  That pipe would go underground into house basement or crawl space before resurfacing to supply house water.

     I don’t remember much of this but am relying on what I have heard.  Dad and Uncle Walter built our tank house (I do remember the tank house) by our well, but even with the tank full, the water would barely drip out of house faucets due to the distance the water had to flow.

     So they built skids and put them under the tank house and used a tractor to drag it up next to the house.  The tank was replumbed into the system.

     The problem now to be solved was how to get the water from the well to the distant tank house.  The answer was a second pump cylinder at the top of the well.  It forced the water through the pipe running to the tank house.  The windmill now did double duty.  It raised the water from the well on the rod’s upstroke.  The down stroke forced the water at the top of the well through the horizontal pipe to the tank house.

      Pumping water manually from this well was twice the work.  On the pasture well, pushing down on the pump handle raised the pump rod with the water.  Gravity helped push the rod back down so the upstroke wasn’t so hard.  But with the double cylinder set up, you had to pull the handle up to force the rod down because it was under pressure from all the water the upper cylinder was pushing to the tank house.

      It was a lot of work digging the trench for the pipe.  It had to be deep enough to be below frost level.  Some of it was done with tractor and plow, but a lot had to be done by hand.  It is steel pipe that has to be connected joint by joint.  I can only imagine the disappointment when the tank in its original location was filled by a day or two of windmill pumping and no water would run from any taps.

      The tank house successfully moved and installed still presented challenges, the main one being how to keep the standpipe, the one from tank to mother earth, from freezing.  Dad built a square 1”X12” housing for the standpipe and insulated it, but there were still below-zero mornings when we were “out of water”.  The pipe was frozen.

     One answer was to put a kerosene lantern at the base of the pipe chase.  The lantern kept the pipe from freezing, but it started a fire or two in the pipe chase.

      In my memory, I open the tank house door (which we often did in summer to get a cool drink directly from the hose bibb faucet coming out of the pipe chase) to the smell of charred wood and wet dirt.  As my eyes adjust to the darkness I can see the blackened 1”X12”’s and the remnants of burnt paper from the insulation.  A quart tin juice can with the top cut out provided a drinking vessel, or you could just get down on your knees and cock your head so the water ran from the faucet directly into your mouth.   When the faucet was cracked open, best for getting a drink without getting water in your nose, it made a sound like a cat hissing.  It tasted best that way, flavored with the mud and charred wood smells. 

     Another problem that probably led to the end of the tank house, the wooden tank always leaked.  Eventually the timbers that supported the tank rotted from the moisture.  There was always mud in the floorless tank house, anyway.  I can still smell the interior of the tank house even if I can’t describe it accurately.

     With the second cylinder in the well pump system, the house well had one more mechanism to maintain.  When the well stopped supplying water, sometimes it would be only the top cylinder that had to be repaired.  For that process there was the “well chain”.  It was a light chain with inch and a half round wooden shaft about twenty inches long and about the size of a stair hand rail wired to the last link of the chain.

     Dad straddled the wooden handle and let himself down into the top of the well opening.  One of us would hold the chain tight to help support him and keep the wooden “seat” from escaping his legs.  It was a tight fit.  The top of the well was a fifty-gallon drum he had to slide into to get to the cylinder.  The pump and pipe were somewhere in the center of the barrel, so he had to share the fifty-gallon drum with the hand pump base and the pipes. 

     He usually still had his hat on as he started down the well opening.  When his head got down to the pump base, he would realize he needed to take his hat off or lose it down the well.  One of us would take it from him and he would drop down below the pump until he hit the end of the chain, which would then become his seat as he commenced getting the cylinder loose.  He would have tied the upper end of the chain to a windmill leg.  He must have known where to knot the chain around the windmill leg.  I don’t ever remember him having to redo the chain length because he was too high or low to do his work.

     The upper cylinder was an inch and a half brass tube.  It was much smaller in diameter than the main pump cylinder.  Dad would unscrew the cylinder.  A piece of wire with a hook to catch the cylinder and tied to the pipes above it would hold the cylinder up out of the way while he removed and replaced the leathers.  I don’t remember for sure, but I think he had to uncouple the pump rod to do the job. 

     Once the new leathers were in place, the brass cylinder had to be forced over the new, stiff leathers and rethreaded to its base.  Dad would get the first leather started into the cylinder.   I remember trying to find a suitable way of driving the cylinder down onto the new leathers.  It had to be done carefully so as not to drop down the well whatever tool (pipe wrench?) was being used to beat on the top of the cylinder.  When both the leathers were all the way into the cylinder, then things would go easier.  Dad could force the brass down to the base, start the threads and tighten it with a pipe wrench.

      Dad would hand up the pipe wrenches and anything else he might have and begin crawling out of the well.  Again, the above-ground helper would assist by pulling up on the chain.  Once his hips were out, he could sit on the cement edge and gather his wits and his strength.

     If the lower cylinder leathers had to be replaced, someone had to ride the well chain down to disconnect the cross pipe that went horizontally to the tank house.  Nowadays, that connection about five or six feet down from the surface would be made with a flexible pipe of some kind that allows you to pull the well pipe up high enough to do the disconnecting above ground, but we never had that luxury.  Every well-pulling job began with someone descending beneath the manual pump assembly and breaking the union loose.  The chain hoist had to be assembled in the windmill tower and hooked to the hand pump to carry the weight of the pipe and pump.  The pipe union was hard enough to break loose with the weight of the pump off of it.  If the horizontal pipe was supporting the weight of the pump, you would never get the union loose.

      Likewise, when the well work was done and the pump and well pipe back in place, someone had to descend into the well’s mouth and reconnect the horizontal pipe to the well pipe.  Then the pump platform could be reassembled and the windmill returned to service.

      Since we never knew when the pump leathers would need replacing, we kept a supply on hand.  They were shelved in the “little room” in the shop.  The shop’s first incarnation was the Ramsey school house, the “little room” on one wall bearing bookshelves.

     One winter a few days after a well operation, the water began to taste and smell like Weed-Be-Gone.  (I never really tasted weed spray before that, so I really can’t make that comparison.)  A little detective work revealed that a jar of 2-4D on a shelf in the shop above the leathers had frozen hard enough to break.  Of course the liquid thawed and dripped down to the shelves below.  The leathers must have been saturated in the stuff.

     Had it been summer, we could have emptied the tank on the lawn or trees.  It wasn’t summer.  We didn’t.  We drank it, cooked with it, washed dishes in it, bathed in it, watered the violets with it, laundered clothes and flushed the stool with it. The cattle drank it, too.

    I don’t know how long the flavor lasted.  I guess we got used to it and didn’t notice as the bouquet gradually faded.  Did the flavored water have an adverse effect on our health?

     I remember one subzero breakdown.  I was too young to be out in the cold.  Dad built a fire near the well using scrap wood and two old rubber tires.  The “boys”, my two older brothers,  got to help.  The well had to be pulled.  They kept the idle tools near the fire in an attempt to keep them, and thus their hands, warm.  I don’t know how they dealt with the water that spilled every time they loosened a pipe joint.  I can only imagine the ice that formed making the well platform slippery and increasing the risk of falling down the well.  What I do remember was the old tires giving off a wonderful black smoke as they burned.  I watched from the house’s east window.

      I remember another winter well malfunction.  I was dressed and ready to take off for school.  Dad came into the yard from a trip to the windmill.  He said I would have to stay home from school and help him pull the pump.  For some reason Neighborly was there.  He told me, “Go on to school.  I’ll help with the well.”  I did, and he did.  Going to school was better than winter well work.

     Eventually, the tank house’s day came.  Dad planned a cistern.  The first step was to dig out a hole exactly the size of the tank house’s inside dimensions.  We were inveterate cave diggers, so digging a hole that size was right up our alley.  The dirt was wet from all the years of drips and the water that escaped from the spigot and didn’t get drunk or captured in a jug or pale.  In places it was muddy, but after getting down a foot or so, it was okay.

     I wasn’t much help after the first layer or two.  I couldn’t throw the dirt out of the tank house door.  It got dug.  Dad made forms out of old one-inch lumber.  He bought water proof cement.  We hauled loads of gravel from the pasture creek.  We put the auger engine on the cement mixer and we ran concrete.

       We also dug a pit just to the north to house a new electric pump with forty gallon pressure tank.  It was also formed and cemented, but not water proof cement.  Nate Einertson installed the new pump and we were ready to switch from gravity flow pressure to electric powered pressure.

     We didn’t use any rebar when we ran the cement for the cistern.  We used the cistern for quite a few years, but it was always problematic.  It leaked.  One day we would have a cistern full of water.  A few hours later the pump would be sucking air.  I couldn’t count all the times we drained the cistern, mopped it out and patched cracks.  It was nice to have the good pressure we never had with the tank house.  But it was less reliable than the old tank house system in a way.  Every time we had to repair the cistern, we would be without water for at least a day while we did the work, and then allowed the patchwork to set up before turning the windmill loose to fill the cistern again.

      Enter Francis “Babe” Eastwood into the picture.  He convinced the folks to drill a new well, install a submersible pump and pump directly into a new pressure tank, eliminating the cistern.  So they drilled a new well just a few feet north of the old well.  The submersible pump eliminated the windmill, the old pump system and the pressure pump in the pit next door. 

     It worked pretty well when the pressure tank was full.  But when Mom washed clothes, the tank would get low and the submersible pump pumping all that way through the ¾” pipe couldn’t begin to keep up, not to mention when the lawn needed watered.  Eastwood was consulted again. 

     Sometime in the late sixties or early seventies, a precast concrete cistern was dug in east of the old cistern that now housed the pressure tank.  A pressure pump was again a necessity.  It was placed in the old cistern with the new pressure tank.  That system remains in service.  We are on the second submersible pump, the original one destroyed by a lightning bolt that hit the garage and entered the farm electrical system via the garage door openers. 

      We are on the third pressure pump, one having frozen and fracturing the pump casting during a colder-than usual winter.  Another burned out a bearing in the motor.

      To run the submersible pump, we had to trench in three heavy cables from the farmyard to the well.  The first cables were aluminum.  The aluminum proved to be unreliable.  In the ‘90’s, we laid copper cables in PVC pipe to help protect the wires from vermin and weather.  Take away the lightning strike and we are fairly trouble free.

     An advantage of having Eastwood as our well man was he was, and now his sons are, there when you need them.  One 4^th of July, I mowed too close to the cistern and hit a surface pipe that connected two electrical sensors that control the well pump.  When I saw what I had done, I immediately called Eastwood, forgetting it was a holiday.  He came out early that afternoon and undid my damage.

     No one has had to go down into a well for forty years.  Both wells are now drilled wells.  When we are out of water, we just call Eastwood.