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A Columbia County Boy's Recollections and Memories of Columbia County Florida (2012) Lenvil H. Dicks

WE GET RUNNING WATER

After Clay Electric put the power lines down the road in front of our house, which was still a dirt road at
that time, we all decided that we would like to have running water, now that we had electricity.

My mother had already furnished an inside bathroom, with a nice tub, lavatory, and commode, and we
had an inside bathroom before we ever had the water available to operate it.

1 must have been about 11 years old at that time, give or take a year, and my dad contacted a colored
man who lived a few miles away from us, and who had learned to drill wells. A good well driller was
unusual in those days, because most people did the same thing that we did, which was to dig an open
well and obtain the water from the spring fed water in the bottom of the well. That, of course, meant
carrying the water to wherever you wanted it to in buckets, and if ma was in quite a hurry for a bucket of
water she would tell me to go to the well and get it and run back with it. I guess when I was running
back to the house with that bucket of water, that could have been considered to be “running water”.

The well driller I had mentioned was an old colored gentleman named Oliver Bradley, and Mr. Bradley
brought over a frame work which he set up over the spot where we wanted to drill the well, and had a
heavy rope around it, which ran through a heavy duty pulley, and he furnished a big iron weight which I
could not begin to lift by myself. It was about the size of an anvil, and was at least that heavy.

Some of the hardest work I ever remember doing was helping to drill that well. It was done by hoisting
up the heavy weight with the pulley, attached to the rope, and Mr. Bradley had a steel sleeve that he
placed in an upright position on the ground where the well was to be, and he would insert a piece of drill
pipe inside that sleeve, and then we would hoist the heavy weight with the pulley and simply let it fly,
dropping it on the top end of the drill pipe.

Each time we dropped that weight we would succeed in getting the drill pipe into the ground perhaps 3
or 4 inches, and with 3 or 4 hoists and drops, we could advance a foot.

We did this at night, starting about dark, and working on it up until about midnight. The reason we did
that is that we had to farm during the day, and could only work on drilling the well at night.

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