well hello everyone tonight

seasons are changing, there is restless/anxious movement all around--

the corn fields are full of migratory birds moving south--they are the smart ones--

Well today I was back on the back forty trying to gather some special curved wood for a hand sleigh order, when I nearly fell into a hidden dug well--it was covered up by vegetation and old branches

I never knew it was there, but it must have been dug by a former owner, that lived on this property before our family came 5 generations ago, sometime before 1850 I put it--It was common for farmers to dig a well at the furthest end of the cleared land to water their stock without moving them very far, and then for no apparent reason they went into disuse, or forgot about

Just as a matter of interest these wells were sometimes 30 to 40 feet deep, stoned up leaving a central opening about 3 feet in diameter, the stoning up procedure somewhat of a mystery.

The locations were usually divined by someone in the area that could do that thing, and these diviners using many different methods would pinpoint underground streams/watersources and give an estimate of the depth--usually pretty accurate--

I have been down in a few wells to help clean them out and the strangest one that I ran across had 6 feet of 2" oak cribbing at the bottom with holes in the sides that allowed the water to come through from the vein in the ground--the well I was in had so much sediment in it that the cribbing was not in sight--as we cleaned it out the cribbing came in sight and as we continued further the holes to admit the water came into view and spurted like from a tap--never forget that one--

Another well I helped my father clean out it had gone dry and the people were in bad straights, well we cleaned it out to no avail, no water--what my father did was to jab a long bar down as far as he could in the bottom, and inserted a stick of dynamite-he told me to get back and then he discharged it- well in no time the well was full, he said that all that was needed was to shake up the earth--it reminded me of today's fracking for natural gas

well have to go now, but I wonder if anyone has anything to add to hand dug wells in other parts of the world, and maybe that stoning up method, never could quite figure out how that was done without someone getting killed and quickly enough to escape the incoming water-

NH