How do you know where to dig a well?

 How do you know where to dig a well?

Religion and Superstition has a long history in the south, the lines between often blurring, not truly together, or separate. Where these diametrically aligned forces meet, one could find many uses like telling the sex of a baby before it’s born, or when to plant crops, or where to dig a well.

This is a story about using this mixing of religion and superstition to dig a well. Now here in Texas, there are only a handful of natural lakes spread across the states. Unless your home or farm is situated along a river or large creek, you must rely on wells, cisterns, or manmade lakes “tanks” for water and not just for your house, but for crops.

My great grandfather, Emmett, needed to dig a well. The land where they lived and farmed was good land, but there were no large creeks or rivers close at hand. They lived about a mile away from Chamber Creek near what is now the shoreline of Richland Chambers Reservoir.

Before he started, he went a got an old black man who lived down the road from them. The man came down with a Bible, an old-time iron house key, and a string.

The man went into their backyard holding the key suspended on the string over the Bible.  He then stood very still and watched as the key would make a revolution then stop, then make another revolution then stop. All in all, he counted fourteen and a half revolutions.

He told Emmett, “you will get water here at fourteen and a half feet. If you keep digging, at twenty-five feet you’re going to hit a big rock. If you can break through the rock, you will have a gusher, if not you will have a mediocre well.”

Well, they went and brought in a guy with a three-foot in diameter auger. At fourteen and a half feet, we struck water, water started pouring in, so they went to the digger’s house and got a sleeve to fit in the hole to hold back the water. They kept digging and hit rock at 18-19 feet. They could not break through it with the auger. They got down there with a sledgehammer and a railroad bars trying to break the rock to let the water flow through, but they were unable to and gave up, bricked in the sides of the well, and had a mediocre well.

This was at the Greenlee house. This was across the road from their old homeplace in Eureka.

I tell this story partially because I like it, but also because when people think of religion and superstition mixing in the south, they think of places like New Orleans, Savannah, Galveston, and Charleston, but even here in rural, East Texas those forces meet and lines blur but in totally bland ways.

The picture is Emmitt, some of his sons and workers bailing hay