Very good stories of wells. When I was a kid the men always did dowsing before drilling. I watched them once. It was not considered a superstition for them to do this. Just a practical step so the men wouldn’t start digging for nothing.
Young Marion learned the hard way that when it comes to humans v trees, the tree always wins and the ax or chainsaw always has the last laugh.
Yes, Marion learned how to swing an ax and participated in wood chopping contests beating most men she competed against. I also suffered Marion's fate when I was trimming a fallen tree and the ax hit my knee. On wells, my father and I dug 3 of them on the old Stillman Gibson property at the Whirlpool. They were 8 ft in diameter and 22 ft deep (the length of the ladder we had.). Only the third one was hooked up to the house we built. The first one involved using dynamite to get through the granite but at 22 ft we only had a trickle. The second one required pulling up a huge boulder but otherwise good digging and a fair amount of water. That one became our 'garden well'. The third one was 300 ft from the house which meant digging a 300 ft trench 4 ft deep. To pull the dirt up we used a tripod made from birch trees, a pulley system, and heavy rope and a 1940 Chevy picckup.
Very good stories of wells. When I was a kid the men always did dowsing before drilling. I watched them once. It was not considered a superstition for them to do this. Just a practical step so the men wouldn’t start digging for nothing.
Young Marion learned the hard way that when it comes to humans v trees, the tree always wins and the ax or chainsaw always has the last laugh.
Yes, Marion learned how to swing an ax and participated in wood chopping contests beating most men she competed against. I also suffered Marion's fate when I was trimming a fallen tree and the ax hit my knee. On wells, my father and I dug 3 of them on the old Stillman Gibson property at the Whirlpool. They were 8 ft in diameter and 22 ft deep (the length of the ladder we had.). Only the third one was hooked up to the house we built. The first one involved using dynamite to get through the granite but at 22 ft we only had a trickle. The second one required pulling up a huge boulder but otherwise good digging and a fair amount of water. That one became our 'garden well'. The third one was 300 ft from the house which meant digging a 300 ft trench 4 ft deep. To pull the dirt up we used a tripod made from birch trees, a pulley system, and heavy rope and a 1940 Chevy picckup.