A well in our yard and an abandoned well down the back end!

We had a well in our yard, very near the house, just west of the Macedonia cemetery - going toward the Old Central School house, that was used for "drinking water".  The water was very good and was so refreshing on a hot summer day. We had a nice shed built over our well and vines grew on two sides of the shed, giving shade underneath.  The water from the well in the pasture was used to fill the black, iron wash pot that Mama boiled the white clothes in. Also to fill the two tubs, one was used to wash the colored clothes and the other to rinse the clothes in. That well had no shed over it, so there was no place for a pulley to run a rope through.  It was covered with boards.  I would only put back one of the boards when I would pull up a bucket of water. We just had a bucket tied onto a rope that we threw down into the well and pulled up the bucket of water. It was not very deep and when the creek nearby "was up" the well water was up also, nearly even with the ground. Sometimes it even looked a little muddy and we couldn't wash then. My brother, Lem, built my Mom a "washhouse" and we thought that was so fancy! It took her all morning to do the washing.  I can remember that the wells were "cleaned out" once in awhile, but none of my family members would do that. There were men that did "well cleaning". I remember the cover on our well in the yard. It just looked like a small screen door that you would raise up and let down. Our well had no pump. We didn't have electricity in that house until 1948 I think. I had left home already when they finally got it. Wanda  Adams nee Kelly.  Posted June 2001.

Everyone in Oden had a well!  There wasn't any other source of water. The above well is just west of the Oden Post Office. A white two story house was still standing here in the 1960s. The Ike Chapman home had a nice well with cold, sweet water at the Oden house and a year round natural spring on the hillside directly behind the Oden school gymnasium.  The spring is still there, still running and providing water for many of the little pastures and gardens there.

This old well in a fence line half between Pencil Bluff and Oden is usually camouflaged with vines and is barely noticeable as you drive by except in winter.  In 1931 when 50% of the village of Oden burned there was no running water and no fire department.  Water had to be fetched by hand from the town folks wells, buckets were passed hand by hand. Many came from the surrounding country to help with the bucket brigade. They won a victory that night. Community cooperation saved half the town. In 1978-79 when water was low Willie Maddox on the Oden Town Council secured the grant to install the Oden-Pencil Bluff Water system. The two towns went in together to obtain a town water supply for the area for about 300 customers or 150 meters.  During the December, 2000 ice storm anyone with an electric pump for their well house loss water until they obtain a generator or the power came back on. 

"We had two wells at our home place. It seemed that having to "draw water" from the well was not a job anyone wanted to do, but it wasn't hard to do." 

Many of the wells, in Arkansas, had a lot of iron in them, the water was bad. Then some had sulfur and that was bad. Local area maps mention Iron Springs, Sulphur Springs and Chalybeate Springs (tasting like iron). Thermal springs are also found in Montgomery Co. along the banks of the Caddo River. Cemeteries in the county sometimes had hand pumps and the Big Brushy Recreational Area still has a well. The ONFS removed the handle off the hand pump as the water was unsafe to drink, contaminated from agricultural livestock operations.

By the 1870s the rope and bucket in the public sixty foot hand dug well on the south east corner courthouse wore out and was replaced by a well-house with a windlass and two heavy oak buckets with iron hoops on a pulley and chain and provided a never ending source of cold clear water and a gathering place. Today, June 2001, the Mount Ida Waterworks source for water is the Cedar Creek Reservoir.

 The older wells were hand dug usually were 12 to 15 feet deep.  In the 50s people began using a truck with a well digger on them to dig the wells. Even the truck dug wells had long buckets on them and water was still drawn by hand. As time progressed, electric well pumps, both above ground and submersible were used and houses were plumbed to carry water into the houses. Well curbs from abandoned covered hand dug wells can still be seen in the area, without homesteads in sight.

"I have an old hand dug well in my yard, here in Mount Ida. It is not used but still has water that could be used if I wanted to."

When the well's dry, they know the worth of water.
  B.F.

    

"Yes, there was a well at Grandpa's house for household use. Also a well by the barn and an abandoned well in one of the fields."

Montgomery Co. ARGenWeb Project

     
The middle photo: The well is on the old Ryals' place place west of Mena. It is still in use today. Of course it has a different cover. It is a hand dug well about 30 ft. deep. It was built with flat rocks gathered from nearby mountains. The Ryals had a black washpot by the well to heat water for mama to hand rub clothes on a rubboard. She also used it to make lye soap.

WATER WAYS By Susan Manlin Katzman
St. Louis Post-Dispatch Page: 16   23 October 1994
Why would anyone spend money for something they could have free or almost free with the flick of a wrist? Why is water bottled water the hottest drink of the '90s? Bottled waters are making waves. More than 800 brands are available in the United States, up from 600 in 1988. Last year alone, sales increased by almost 7 percent. Demographic studies tells us who's doing the drinking: Most bottled water fans are 25 to 34 years old, and 54 percent of them are women. We know what they are drinking: all waters flavored, unflavored, carbonated and still. We even know the when morning, noon and night. And the where just about everywhere. What's the scoop? Are there discernible differences from brand to brand?
PINE VALLEY - Natural Spring Water
Source: Label states, "Source: Natural Spring in Montgomery County, Arkansas"
Paid: $1.29 for a 1.5-liter bottle.

Another Company
Alexa Springs (Montgomery County)

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REMEMBERING ARKANSAS Gristmills once as numerous as kernels on an ear of corn by Tom W. Dillard
The Arkansas Democrat Gazette 4 November 2007
Gristmills were an important part of many rural Arkansas communities from the settlement of the state until after World War I. These mills, often powered by falling water in the uplands and steam in the lowlands, ground corn into cornmeal and wheat into flour. Along with cotton gins and small lumber mills, gristmills constituted much of what passed for manufacturing in rural areas. These mills also served an important social purpose for rural Arkansans in that the periodic visit to the gristmill was a time for socializing. Some believe the first gristmill in what is today Arkansas was built in Lawrence County, Missouri Territory, in 1815. The English naturalist Thomas Nuttall made a tour of the newly created Arkansas Territory in 1819 and reported progress was afoot: "The privations of an infant settlement are already beginning to disappear as grist and saw-mills now commence [to appear]." Those settlers, regardless of how tough and independent, knew to appreciate a gristmill. Without a mill, corn had to be pulverized by hand - a slow and tiring process - and the resulting meal was not very good. Corn was the literal staff of life for most Arkansans in the 19th century. Even though wheat, rye and other grains were grown on many farms, for most areas it was corn that fed man and beast for generations. Another foreign visitor, Henry R. Schoolcraft, observed in 1818 that Ozarkers served hot corn bread with butter and honey. While a farmer might expect his hogs to forage for a living, his horses and mules usually received supplemental feedings of corn in addition to fodder. Slave owners fed their slaves mostly corn, too.

The late historian Orville W. Taylor wrote that "the high prices of wheat flour as compared to cornmeal prevented the widespread use of wheat bread for slaves, as well as for many of the white people of the period." Taylor noted that slaves usually existed on meals "in which meat, [corn] meal, and molasses were among the main components." Farmers looked forward to the corn harvest. By that point in the year, the meal remaining in the bin might be running low - and it was sometimes infested with weevils. John Brown of Camden, who had a plantation at nearby Princeton, wrote gladly in his diary on Aug. 29, 1853, of having new cornmeal.

In 1860 Arkansas produced more than 17 million bushels of corn. The census of that year listed fewer than 254 professional millers in the state. Some of these men worked in gristmills owned by wealthy planters, but most lived in towns and crossroad villages throughout the state. The abundance of streams named Mill Creek in the state reminds us how ubiquitous was the gristmill. Settlers in north Arkansas found the abundance of springs and creeks ideal for building water-powered gristmills. A mill dam was usually constructed to create a pond that fed a water wheel. The wheel in turn powered one or more sets of grist stones, called "burrs," which slowly ground corn into meal or wheat into flour. In the lowlands mill ponds usually fed water to the steam boilers that turned the giant stone. Sometimes a gristmill would operate in conjunction with a cotton gin.

The Ozark gristmills could be scenic. Among the particularly handsome mills I have seen in old photographs were the ones at Evening Shade in Sharp County and Marble Falls in Newton County - both now long gone. By 1933 the gristmill had become a thing of fond memories to many, including North Little Rock developer Justin Matthews. In that year he had a concrete version of an abandoned gristmill built near Lakewood, one of his subdivisions. Ozarks writer and promoter Otto Ernest Rayburn wrote extensively on the gristmills, sometimes waxing on about how tradition clings to the mills "like moss to an oak tree." Baxter County native and well-known journalist Tom Shiras wrote wistfully in 1945 of the loss of almost all the 15 water-powered gristmills in his county. Shiras wrote of the gristmill as "the forum of the neighborhood where all public questions were discussed and gossip exchanged." He said this was due to everyone having to wait while their grinding was completed, and the "time was passed in discussion." By 1955 Rayburn could find only a handful of gristmills still operating in the state. Old-timers grumbled about the bland nature of mass-produced cornmeal, but their children had no problems adapting.

 

REMEMBERING ARKANSAS Arkansans worked hard to get food on the table by Tom W. Dillard
The Arkansas Democrat Gazette 25 June 2006
I have just picked and eaten the first cucumbers from my garden. I hoed a long row of purple hull peas, and gave a side dressing of fertilizer to my sweet corn. The sweet corn is tasseling, which means it is only a few more days until I can feast on roasting ears. Our ancestors loved this time of the year, when the garden finally started producing fresh vegetables to relieve the monotony of everyday fare. In the modern world with its grocery stores and specialty markets, it is difficult to comprehend how hard our ancestors worked to put food on the table.
If cotton was king of the crops, corn was the queen. Settlers almost always cleared a field for corn production as soon as a house was constructed. Corn was the staff of life for most Arkansans, whites and blacks alike. Slaves were said to live on the "three M diet," consisting of meat, meal and molasses. The 1860 census showed that more than 17 million bushels of corn were produced in Arkansas that year, with every county represented. In that same year, more than 250 Arkansans made their living as millers, usually grinding corn into meal.

Considering the limited variety of available food, especially in the winter, it is not surprising that 19th-century Arkansas women put great effort into their gardens and took pride in the results. One young wife who traveled west to settle in Ouachita County wrote her mother back in Alabama on April 6, 1859, with enthusiasm: "I must tell you about my garden. I have a very forward garden I think, considering how late a start we had, have had nice mustard salad, radishes, & lettuce for several weeks, have 4 squares set out in collards ... have squashes & cucumbers up & growing fine. ..." Many early Arkansans turned their corn crops into whiskey. I prefer mine as roasting ears. I already have a pan sitting on the stove ready for those first ears.