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Originally Posted by wet work
well obv. a backhoe is cheating! only like 3-4ft for me(i've paid other people to dig my septics/wells). one thing i do find fascinating is hand-dug wells--they can get really deep(some interesting stuff in the foxfire books) usually father/son teams. crazily dangerous--and they talk about being so far down that when you look up you only see about a nickel-sized piece of daylight--@$1/foot. there's a really old-deep- hand dug well pretty close to my place--my friend that drills wells showed it to me. i have 1 that is about 10ft deep but it was already there--dug by the guy i bought the place from.
We have two wells on our property up in New England. My dad bought the place around the time I was born and my generation owns it now. The well that feeds the house water supply got contaminated somehow in the late seventies, and I was assigned to go to the bottom of it and take a look-see. We rigged a rope harness and I climbed twenty or so feet down; the walls were set fieldstone, easy climb. Found a dead ****, but the state water analysts said that couldn't be it given the bacteria they were seeing. Couldn't drink the water without boiling for a couple of years, then it cleared up on its own. Weird.
It was damn cold in the bottom of that thing, even though it was a hot summer day outside. Freaky being down there, even though it's not that far. I have no idea who originally dug the thing and lined the walls; we believe it was done some time in the late 1800s.