Do you remember

[peacock]

Do you remember going to the well to get water to prime the pump in your house?

 

[lumbercamp]

Not here, but at my grandparents house years ago.

 

[DigginThePast]

Nope. Does that make me a whippersnapper?

 

[Shortstack]

We moved into town when I was 5 years old because my Mama didn't want me to ride a bus to school. Before that, my Dad was a sharecropper and we never lived in a house that had it's own well. I remember helping carry water from a neighbor's well about 1/4 mile away. I was only 4-5 years old so I had to carry a couple of 1-gallon syrup cans full of water and those damned wire bales would cut into my hands; especially during the cold weather.

On priming the pump; you'd better have a gallon bucket of water because if the leather valve in the pump was worn, it might take a gallon (a dipper at a time) to get the well water up the pipe to the base of the plunger were all of the air pocket would be "flushed".

Also used the rope and pulley system to lower that specially designed well bucket down the well pipe. That bucket was about 4 or 5 inches in diameter by about 3 feet in length. It had a hinged bottom made of wood or leather to allow the water to fill the bucket from the bottom. Without that flipper valve in the bottom, the bucket would just float and not fill. The well casing where this type bucket was used was only about 10 inches in diameter.

 

[sniffer]

I can still remember the pump on the end of the sink by the back door, even though we had running
water, mom would still use the water from the old pump for coffee, that water tasted a heck of a lot
better than the stuff from the city

 

[jeff of pa]

I Remember Somone Priming a Pump when I Was very young
any Comment Who would be Strictly a Guess.

I Remember going outside My Uncles House
with a blue long handle water cup
to get drinks out the well bucket
when we would visit.

as far as I Know, it is still their only
Water source.

 

[mojjax]

Back in 1981 I rented a small house . The kitchen sink had an iron hand pump . I always had to keep a jug of water handy to prime it . Out in the back yard was an outhouse .

One winter morn I drudged through the snow to to do my business . While sitting on the hole , something fell from a shelf above me . It landed in my pubic hair . It was a newly born mouse . It was all pink and wrinkly , eyes weren't yet open . I carefully removed it from my crotch and looked up , the mother mouse was staring down at me . I gave her baby back . She pull it into an old rolled-up screen that was stored up there , I guess that's where the nest was .

The rent was cheap

 

[AU24K]

At my Grandmother's farm back in the 60's, I remember a well in the back yard, outside the kitchen door.
I also remember the crank-up phone on the wall, a Stromberg & Carlson? She also had a crank-up record player, maybe a "Silvertone." There was an old tube radio that took forever to warm up! The antenna was a wire strung up through the trees.

Scott

 

[lonesomebob]

-Back in the late thirtys I helped drive our first well. Before that my dad had to go down a hill and ,using a yoke carry two five gallon cans of water from a flowing well . One time in January,he slipped and fell and was drenched. The language used that day was enlightening. Does that make me an old fart?

 

[sniffer]

nope, just means your memory has not failed..............yet. LOL

 

[silverswede]

My early years were of carrying water from a spring quite aways off for drinking water. For any other purposes it was taken from the nearby lake or melted snow in winter. Later we had a shallow well and pump that would freeze solid in winter and had to be thawed and then primed with a teakettle of hot water. Still later we finally hired a contractor to drill a well. Irony, he struck a flowing well at 26 feet and about ten feet from the kitchen.

 

[Shortstack]

-Back in the late thirtys I helped drive our first well. Before that my dad had to go down a hill and ,using a yoke carry two five gallon cans of water from a flowing well . One time in January,he slipped and fell and was drenched. The language used that day was enlightening. Does that make me an old fart?

Nooooooo............an old turd..............welcome to the club.

I remember watching my Mama wash clothes in a cast iron pot set on live coals in the back yard. Her hands would be beet red and her knuckles would crack from the cold. That is why I have NO SYMPATHY for these whining, sniffling members of the "younger" generation. When they have any problems, they just want to stand around picking their noses, waiting for someone else to take care of them instead of doing for themselves.

 

[DigginThePast]

Back in 1981 I rented a small house . The kitchen sink had an iron hand pump . I always had to keep a jug of water handy to prime it . Out in the back yard was an outhouse .

One winter morn I drudged through the snow to to do my business . While sitting on the hole , something fell from a shelf above me . It landed in my pubic hair . It was a newly born mouse . It was all pink and wrinkly , eyes weren't yet open . I carefully removed it from my crotch and looked up , the mother mouse was staring down at me . I gave her baby back . She pull it into an old rolled-up screen that was stored up there , I guess that's where the nest was .

The rent was cheap

You have far stronger nerves than I. I probably would have jumped up and the poor guy would have fell in.