Wells and cisterns

MARK ROBKE

Well-known Member
The post below got me wondering (again),why people have wells but not cisterns.Where I grew up cisterns were about the only water source for most unless you lived in town with 'city' water.I now live in a more rural area with 'county' water,but I believe many still have cisterns;there was one here when we moved in 24 yrs ago,but I filled it in to build a garage.So why do some areas have wells and not others?Mark
 
Probably has a lot to do with the availability of ground water.Where I live most wells are just a point driven in the ground on a 2" pipe maybe 25' deep. Our wells are 3' casing wells 50' deep. The ones in the river bottoms are like 30' deep and can run irrigation systems and never go dry.
 
I also think it has to do with a cistern might have more chance of getting contaminated from run off than a deep well. In addition many areas you have to go deep to hit water.
 
The old homestead house had a cistern. I don't know if it's used by the current owners. All the house roofs eave troughs were piped into it. There was a pattern in the grass out by the horse barn, which Dad said was a filled in cistern. They seem to have fallen from favor. I don't know why.

There is a cistern under the granary(of all places!) in an old barn here, which had all wood troughs going to it. I still have a couple of pieces of it. There was a dug well at each house, and animal barn. Then drilled wells showed up before my time. 70-80 years ago?
 
Dad had a cistern put in after he moved the house and added on more rooms in 1948. The cistern was primarily to collect and store soft rainwater for laundry, as our wells were very hard water. I don't think water softeners were around back then, at least I never saw one.
 
Maybe that's it! The advent of water softeners eliminated the need for rain water. As well as, I suppose, a better supply from a drilled well, over a dug well which ran dry.
 
Where I live, most people had wells unless the lived in certain area where the rock was too thick, cost a fortune to drill thru so they had cisterns. Down in the river valleys they can hit water just about 30 to 40 feet down. Our well was 70' but my grandfathers was 280'.
 
The farm where I was born and raised had a cistern, the water supply was a deep well with a windmill to pump the water. The water was pumped into the cistern that was on a hill that provided pressurized water by gravity to the house and barn. The cistern was a buffer to provide water when the wind didn't blow, it had to be cleaned and sanitized periodically.
 
In the post below what I mistakenly described as a well is actually a cistern that a spring runs into at only 6 gpm. I don't know how many gallons the cistern holds.
 
The biggest cistern was dug here in '36. Since this was a dairy, the cistern for the milkhouse and barns is huge. It is 26 feet deep and 20 feet across laid up with brick. It is truly a beautiful piece of work. I can't imagine the labor it took to get it done. I still use it everyday to water the animals and garden (I just have a submersible sump pump with a garden hose attached). I was able to get it pumped almost dry many years ago in a drought and pulled out a few pipes that had fallen in it. Within a few months it had started filling back up. Last I lifted the lid it was about three feet from the top. Half of it is under the milkhouse so I have to make sure it isn't too full or the floor gets wet in the milkhouse. I use that as a chicken house now.

The cistern for the house was right next to it but was filled with sand and capped many years ago. It wasn't done right and has caused that basement wall to start caving in.

I'd be lost without the cistern here. The hydrants all run rural water so I would pay for all livestock water. All of the farms here had a cistern for the barn and one for the house. I know of one crazy old coot that still refuses to pay for water so she still uses her cistern. Must not be a good plan - she goes down the road with the water tank to fill her cistern several times a month. I wonder who she steals that water from?? Folks don't have their own wells here. The well water is too salty for use.
 
The farm where I grew up had 3 cisterns, 2 still exist, a hand dug well and a deep well. One of the cisterns was plumbed to the house for washing (no softenor back then). In more recent years the 2 cisterns were great for watering gardens during dry times.
a233176.jpg

a233177.jpg
 
Farm I grew up on had cistern for washing etc, but well for drinking, cooking, & livestock.
Cistern was filled by rain & snow melt off roof, hand pump on kitchen sink.
Well was deep, drilled to 400', but pump cylinder at 150'. Mostly used windmill power. Well was on higher ground with large storage tank, gravity fed to tap in hog barn, tank at large barn for cattle. Drinking & cooking water was bucket on kitchen table. If no wind, house water was hand pumped. Before we got electricity in 48 or 49, had JD hit-miss to get water, later got elec motor on pump.
To keep this tractor related, if Dad turned on water for cattle tank over noon dinner time, he would hide the tractor (Farmall Regular) crank at water valve to prevent forgetting it & tank from running over & making a mess.
Willie
 
I grew up in my grandfather's house built in about 1900. He had two above-ground metal cisterns on piers. They were about eight feet in diameter, eight feet tall. Don't know how to calculate volume, but I'm guessing about 1500 gallons each. There was a well, but the water was almost unusable.
 
Since our farm house was built in 1927, it had a well inside the basement, and allso a well outside under the windmill. Grandpa used to say that during a drought, the windmill could run dry- it fed an above-ground tank for the cattle to drink from by gravity, a couple hundred feet out behind the barn.

When we remodeled, we removed the basement floor to install drainage and pour a new floor. I decided to try to twist off the first section of well pipe- the whole thing was turning, so I pulled up and pulled the whole well out of the ground! two six-foot sections of pipe and a point. The basement is half in ground and half bermed-up above ground, so four feet plus 12 feet of pipe and three feet of point, total about 20 feet deep. And maybe 50 feet from the septic tank. Always tasted like good water, cold and clear, and never had to carry it in the house!!

Now, we have city water drawn out of Lake Michigan, for the house and barns. My cows have the prettiest teeth of any herd.
 
No need for a cistern have a good well with lots of very pure clean water and several springs on the farm 2 which I can run down to my house and garden off the mountain
gravity flow.
 
My grandmother used to have a cistern for everything except drinking water. For that she had a well with a hand pump. During dry years the cistern would go dry and have to pay to have water brought in. We are in the middle of significant drought here and any cistern would be dry by now.Cistern water these days would never pass the board of health testing.
 
The home place only had a well. I think we could have used a cistern. During the dry months Dad would have to load a water tank on the old chevy flat bed, and head to town where there was a 2 inch valve. I think they felt sorry for us as no one ever said anything about taking the water. When we moved about 1/2 mile down the road, after Dad and his brothers sold the home place. The other farm had two cisterns.We used one for drinking. I think bird poop makes water taste sweet. My wife's aunt lived in a house on the property. The cistern for that house had a wood top. Her aunt fell through one time with one leg in and one leg out. She sat there until Dad came by and pulled her out. We later filled it in with dirt. Stan
 
Years ago my area had above ground cisterns on stilts. This allowed gravity to feed the water supply.
We get over 60 inches of rain a year spread over most months and digging a hand dug well is impossible because you will hit dirty water about a foot down.
As soon as they invented wells that use a pipe in the ground it was changed over to wells.
Some older homes out in the country still have the cistern standing next to the house but no one uses them for household water because of government regulations.
 
There's an old cistern under our hip roof barn grade. I feel like I should fill it in before I put something though it, but it's kind of cool so I hate to. It's around 6ft tall and around 20ft long.
 
Our well is still in our basement. 12ft
below the basement floor. We pulled it to
put a new point on 6-8yrs ago. Was plugged
up with calcium. We tested it a few times
and it's always tested good, but still
don't drink it. Makes me nervous that
shallow. Believe that's our next upgrade.
 
(quoted from post at 11:09:44 07/29/16) Maybe that's it! The advent of water softeners eliminated the need for rain water. As well as, I suppose, a better supply from a drilled well, over a dug well which ran dry.

Your post gave me a flashback - my mother would use rain water to wash her hair. I remember many times a rain would come up a she would take a dish pan out side to catch rain water.

We always had a well since I started remembering anything. Is was right outside the house with 120 ft of wood sucker rod going down into the pipe. Every now and then we had to pull the sucker rod to replace the "pump leather" at the bottom.
 
city water runs past my home ,, but I am not hookt up ,. don't need it,,.. I have 2 cisterns one is 20 ft by 10 ft , under my patio ,, it was dug out in 1938 and has a 6 ft deep charcoal and sand filtr system I am told that was designed by wpa that was building the hi school then ,the other cistern was dug in 1929 it is 14 ft deep x 6 ft, it does not have a filter system so occassionaly I will pour a qt of Clorox in there to take the summer hot water taste out,, and I have a 50 ft drilled well at the barn , that will pump tirelessly when it rains as often as it does this yr ,,but in the worst droughts the well will run dry in a half hour,,it does have good cold water ,,. now in answer to why people quit using these resoursces,. pump problems can drive a good dairy nuts ,, most everyone demands water NOW,. my well can be aconnected by garden hose to my house system , should my old piston pump fail ,and it has //that is why it is always best to have more than one working pump ,.,.
 
We had a cistern here when I was a kid. A pitcher pump plumbed to the cistern sat on the edge of the porch sink. We did have modern plumbing then but before the house had plumbing this pump was the wash water supply for the house. It was filled by rainfall off the roof.
 
We had a cistern here when I was a kid. A pitcher pump plumbed to the cistern sat on the edge of the porch sink. We did have modern plumbing then but before the house had plumbing this pump was the wash water supply for the house. It was filled by rainfall off the roof.
 
No one seemed to mention that well drill rigs are a lot better than they used to be. It didn't used to be so easy to drill a well hundreds of feet deep, people didn't have the money to pay for it. Also many people did not have elecricity to pump the water. The farm I grew up on had a poor well for many years until dad hired a modern well rig, (about 1968) that could drill through the layer of hardpan that no one before had been able to do. But, the other side of the story is that we are using water faster than it is being replentished so we have to keep drilling deeper.
 
Several years ago I had the water in my cistern tested. I had cattle with circulation issues and I wanted to make sure the water was good. It's a little cloudy if you fill a stock tank but everything in it was within tolerances as far as the rural water system was concerned. That was the last thing left before we decided on fescue foot.

I learned fast NOT to use cistern water in chicken/turkey waterers. They get funky fast and the smell will rip your head off. You need the chlorine in the rural water to kill everything when it is filled.
 
Some country folks living in Hawaii have no choice, they have to use above ground cisterns 10,-20,0000 gallon. Hard to drill a well is hardened lava rock. Some living in remote locations are also off the grid, generators or solar.
 
Nearest good water sand is between 1800 and 2000 feet where our FHA financed (thank you US Govt.....er ah US taxpayers) wells are located. Only wells around here that produced for service that was NOT considered "meeting current modern house requirements", were 250' and seasonal. Down on the TX. coast, my other grand dad had a 25 footer that he used to keep his pond full and another to run his semi modern house.
 

We sell tractor parts! We have the parts you need to repair your tractor - the right parts. Our low prices and years of research make us your best choice when you need parts. Shop Online Today.

Back
Top