Peering at the Past – Water Flows Downhill; Water Flows Uphill

About 1861, at the depth of 40 feet, water flowed into a drilled well and froze, filling it with solid ice to within a few feet of the top. Summer ice was still found in it many decades later. Eventually, the opening filled in naturally. That was the most amazing well in far southeast Houston County, but not the only remarkable one.

Early white settlers lived near springs or creeks. In some rural, hilly areas, there were springs near the base of almost every hill. People walked almost everywhere, including to more than one spring, even one belonging of a friendly neighbor. Charlie Kubitz devised a yoke that allowed him to carry two or four pails of water a time.

One resident told of visiting at the Kubitz house when she was about five years old in the 1940s. “They had a pail sitting on the kitchen floor. Someone came in the room, and I was backing up, and I sat right down into that cold-water pail. Everybody laughed at me, and they had to go get another pail of water!”

They often dug ponds to contain run off water for livestock. However, not all springs were in desired locations or provided the best water or enough water for the family. Spring water was preferred for everything, mandatory for cooking and drinking. However, it was often too great a distance to carry enough spring water for cleaning and laundry, too.

For laundry, most farms used cisterns, slightly-below-ground-level storage tanks next to the house to collect soft rainwater from the roof. It helped to have a clean metal roof. A hand pump inside near the entrance to the farmhouse allowed water to be pumped to a sink. A rain barrel could be a substitute for a cistern.

Drilling wells was a solution to have enough water where you needed it. In the early 1900s, they first dug farm wells in the valleys, thinking they would not have to go as deep to find water. That proved true, but in the Winnebago Valley that water was not suitable, being so full of sediment that had to settle before water could be used – if they wanted to use it at all. In the 1940s, those lower wells were closed and replaced by wells drilled above the farmhouses, maybe 150 to 200 feet or more until they hit water. If they did not hit good water the first time, they would drive a casing down past that opening and continue until they hit hard rock again and kept drilling.

Along County Road 5, windmills up on the hills pulled up the water, and then gravity sent the water down to the houses. Eventually, trees grew tall enough to block the wind, but by that time, some of the windmills had been replaced by electric pumps. However, during World War II (early 1940s), they stopped extending electric power lines down the valley. After the war, the farmers yet to receive electricity got together and helped clear the right-of-way for the power lines.

There were areas along the Mississippi River where well water flowed uphill to farmhouses from artesian wells at lower elevations. Unlike a spring where water seeps out because the ground is below the water table, an artesian well brings water to the surface by natural pressure rather than with a pump or windmill. While drilling, an artesian well might result instead of a traditional well. Some artesian wells sent water into the air like a geyser or oil gusher, several feet up to as high as 65 feet.

In 1878, a well near the Schaller Mill, which according to the 1882 History of Houston County, “discharges about 15 feet above the surface about 950 gallons of clear, sparkling water per minute, at a regular temperature, summer and winter, of 54 ½ degrees.” The artesian well water helped power the mill. A firm from Janesville, Wisc., drilled the well in six and half days at a cost of $2 per lineal foot.

Clyde Visger (1885-1964), a commercial fisherman from the village of Jefferson in Jefferson Township, had a warehouse where a large artesian well was used for a large live-fish pond. Fish not yet sold were submerged in cages until they were needed.

A couple of farms in the river hills near Brownsville drilled wells at an elevation 50 or more feet below the farmhouse. One artesian well had enough pressure to flow uphill in pipes to the dwelling and ice house and then down to a barnyard. Later at an elevation in between the well and the farmhouse, a tap was added for the hog house. One such artesian well pushed water uphill at three gallons a minute.

Below one of those farmhouses on Highway 26, there is a wayside where for decades motorists could enjoy artesian well water coming out of a pipe. The pipe is still there, but the well has been capped by the state of Minnesota.

That 1882 History says water in Brownsville comes mostly from wells, and those along the base of the bluff furnish clear water, but the wells in a ravine at a lower elevation toward the Mississippi River was “unfit for domestic use. Springs are numerous and furnish good water.”

Before electricity, some farms had a springhouse, a small usually one-room building built over a spring. It could not only keep spring water clean, away from leaves and animals, but with the running, cool spring water, could also keep perishables cool without needing ice or electric refrigeration.

Farms without a spring house would have an ice house. Ice would be cut in blocks out of a waterway in the winter and hauled into an ice house and stored in sawdust. In warm weather, ice blocks would be transferred into an ice box in the farmhouse. In town, the creamery, drug store, butcher and tavern each had its own ice house. In downtown Brownsville, businesses built up against a bluff, dug caves into the bluff for cool storage.

Sources: interviews with local residents and the book, “A Creek Runs Through Me; A History of the Winnebago Creek Valley in Southeastern Minnesota” by Barbara Scottston and Terry Atherton, 2013.