It took teamwork to locate and uncover the artesian well and pump Nils and his brother, Peter, believed was buried “somewhere under the driveway” about 50 years ago. They deduced that the well was drilled after 1970 when the Johnson family returned from a year living in Hong Kong and before 1974 when the state started recording the drilling of new artisan wells because there is no record of it. Before their parents had the well drilled, the family used water from a shallow dug well only for washing and collected drinking water from a spring down the road. Nils and Peter both recall going to down the hill when they were boys to fill jugs from a pipe sticking out of the spring. And after the new well was drilled, Nils says, Roger, boasted about the volume and quality of the water flowing from the aquifer, ‘like an underground river.”

Current code requires wells to be marked by pipes that extend above at least 18 inches above grade. Before 1974, there may not have been that requirement or it may not have been enforced because no such pipe existed. That meant we started with a dowser with copper cables that misleadingly lead us to a lead pipe from a pre-1926 era. Then we employed a surveyor with an electronic metal detector to locate it. He may have found it but we only had a shovel and didn’t dig deep enough. Finally, Gary Crowell brought in his Kubota to excavate and and Ryan Crowell got down in the hole to dig the last few feet, following the black pipes to uncover the well head, which was gushing water. Thank you to Batty, Gary and Ryan!

By the next day, the hole was filled with water. By the amount accumulated without the pump running, Gary confirmed that we have a “true artisan well.” So Roger was right! We will have plenty of clean drinking water that we can pump to the Red House in its new location.

In other news this week:

Veneer went around the exposed concrete of the new foundation.

In the lower field, a patch of Japanese knotweed went down.

And in the upper field, our vegetable garden went in.