Appalachian People How they got Water back in the day and still do

[Music] the mighty appalachian among the oldest if not the oldest mountains in the world and these mountains is full of water from their lakeways the rivers the streams the caves water everywhere in these mountains but nowadays it's just easy just to go to the sink in the kitchen and get as much water as you want clean fresh water and after a hard hard hot day of work to relax in a good hot tub but you ever think about back in the old days how they used to get their water how they found it and the ways they got it up to the house well we're gonna we're gonna look at it in this video of some of the ways that they've got their water water the essential part of life without it man wouldn't last very long or any living thing for that coat but they've been trying to get close to this water as possible since the beginning of time now these old people come into these old appalachian mountains back when they settled this country they just didn't come into open fields like they did in the prairie lands out west this was wilderness they had to hack their way in here and hacked their way into making a a place for a home or start a little farm start a garden that's just the way it was this is a rough country and they tried their best to get close to water source as possible they'd build little homes like this as close to these water sources as possible they could homes look like this they got a roof over their head some way to cook prepare food eat yourself in the winter but they had no way to put water in the house except for places like this so they tried their best to build close to water sources so they didn't have to pack it some up now as time went on the land got claimed up so much that people couldn't get close to the water sources so on these farms and stuff like that so they had to come up with other ways to get water and we'll look at some of them here they could get they could use a cistern method a well method a pump method spraying method out of a cave out of the creeks rivers whatever they could but wherever the land was is what they had to deal with that's just the way it was back in them days first thing we'll look at is the spring how they got their water they tried to they tried to build as best they could close to these springs but they could build right on these creeks and rivers because it would blood sometimes so they tried to get a few hundred feet away from them but they would have to pack that water up to the house and he could be a chore sometimes i know i've had to pack some for my my grandparents and every place had an old spring house if they was lucky they had a spring on the property they looked about like this old spring house just a protected place where the water comes out of the ground where they can get it and they had things like this too just little cauldrons here that the spring would come into and fill up and run out easy to just dip water out of and a lot of places use pipes too stuck in a in a spring to get it out away from the rock where you could just get to it this is an old spring it's still being used today on 25 e in east tennessee on clinch mountain being used as spurs i can and hits the best tasting water tank it wasn't nothing back in them days i know a lot of old places got pipes coming out of springs on these mountains back when i was a small boy used to pack this water and this is an old cave when a spring comes out a hit they got a pipe on hit this is over old chuck swann in east tennessee it runs 24 7. best tasting water and it's about like it was around the house you brought up you kept some for drinking you kept some for cooking washing such a thing and it wasn't nothing when i was a small boy you was out hunting with your dad or out in these woods and there's a spring you get down and get you a drink of water but you can't do that nowadays it's according to where you're at because of so much pollution in the ground anymore and that's a shame and i never thought growing up that would they ever sell bottled water that was a free commodity to everyone water was water i never thought you'd have to buy it in a ball well that's that's the uh looking at the springs here's another myth cisterns and what a cistern is it's just a vessel or a container in the ground where they collect water off a runoff of rain now here's an old place here where these logging i found this place hunting years ago the house or cabin's gone but the old cistern's still there i thought it was a whale when i looked down in it it's just a sister about 20 foot deep that's an old one made out of rock [Music] time's gone by how much water's been dipped out of that sister probably the cabin run into it off the roof or something that's what i figured now you could still make your system today they're not in the ground i've got one on the back of my house where i just collect rain water to water the garden or the plants or the flowers or whatever and you could drink this in an emergency but you you would have to boil it or use chemicals to purify because you just don't drink rain water anymore so that's the system now another method we'll get into is whales a lot of places didn't have water so they had to dig a whale and how they found the waters the big thing here's a thousand well donny you finally lost it what in the world are you talking about this has been going on for hundreds of years this don't work for everybody but it works people find water like this all the time and they still do today it don't matter what sex you are what age you are if you've got the ability and the gift to do this you can find anything you're looking for with these dowsing rods now a lot of people use certain kinds of wood forked wood but i just use regular old metal coat hangers they work great for me i found my water line a couple of times with this i didn't believe it at first either till i tried it but it works for me and here you can even buy these things online i've seen them you could buy them online but why be uh buy them when you can just make them i'm an old wired coat hanger and here's how they work here's mine that i use just simple coat hangers you concentrate your mind on what you want to look for it's just a middle thing with nature and when you come up on what you're looking for you're concentrating on these will cross and there it is but then the hard part when you find water is digging that well it's a hard job and they usually done it by community they would help each other just like building a house they would dig a whale but a lot of people done this for a living too and here's about what the whale looked like a little drawing when they got the whale dug down to the water maybe 20 feet maybe 40 foot maybe more but what they do they brick it to keep it from collapsing the dirt over time or keep the water from being so muddy and put drain holes in it ever so often so the water would seep in it might look like this when they rocked it it may look like it the walls of that whale and like i said people done this for a living this was a big living back in them day it may look like this down through looking from the top down or looking from the inside out look like this but that's how wells was and it was this was a big big big thing making living back in day here's some old pictures of back in the days where people had whales may look like this outside it might look like this on who made the whale and how they wanted it could like make it look like this like the ancient times the way they just bucket it out and if you're really lucky you've got a whale right next to the house you don't have to pack it a few hundred feet or more in bad weather [Music] so the next thing we're going to look up on is the pumps now they get all kinds of different pumps well back in them days they'd hand drill these down until they hit water and they'd put a pump on it and you know that pump would create a suction and bring the water up and every little community like these mining camps would have a hand pump where everybody gets the water and pack it back to the house and a lot of little farms have their own personal place like this this was a big thing but nowadays what do they do they just come in here and they drill down to the hit water and they set you up completely now this ain't cheap i've never had this done but a lot of my friends have and he's very very expensive i'm telling here's basically what an electrical pump looks like a submersible once you finally drill the hole put the pump down in the casing down in there to hit the water and this is it pressure switch kicks it off and on got a pressure tank this is basically the layout of an electrical submersible pump out in the rural areas this is being used all the time now another thing you don't see much of these around the appalachians but they are here in certain places this is mostly out west the old windmill and these old windmills pumped a lot of water especially just constant water especially if you got a lot of cattle stuff and here's basically the layout of what they look like and how they work that the wind would turn the blade and the blades would transfer through this gearbox and make a a mechanism go up and down like your hand company and he would constantly pump when the wind blowed into that storage tank of course you got a brake on it where you could shut it down to work on it or didn't want it to run but that's basically what that is now these little old communities especially these old mining communities this is how they got their water old hand pump everybody used it and it but they had a steel packet back to the house just according how close you was to the pump you might carry 100 yards back to the house or more and when it was horse day oh man i'd say they've done a lot of water packing you can only carry so much water at one time you're when you're washing they cook it up heat it on the stove to clean your clothes but this was the worst tub of the day this is what you took a bath in this is your bathtub had a hard day's work in the mines or whatever you come home this is your bathtub of course this is a small one this is not a big one you could get in but when i was kids i remember getting in even the old school houses [Music] they didn't have no indoor plumbing or nothing like that kids took kerns packing water up to the school every day so they'd have something to drink during class that's day's way gone by and it didn't have no indoor plumbing this was your bathroom an old outhouse outback for many a house growing up i've had to use these when i was a young man too nowadays it's just so simple hot tub waiting on you all you got to do is turn it on modern conveniences but i hope we don't have to go back to that but you never know history has got a bad bad thing about repeating itself now this old these old people in these appalachians they know how to work this water right here's an old meal water meal of course that's another video but they know how to work this water they made it work for them and didn't need no power either so there you go different ways of getting water so i hope you enjoyed this there's so much history in these old mountains and across the country and i'm just trying to share how things used to be and how things have changed so much so i want to thank you for watching and i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: DONNIE LAWS

Views: 333,853

Keywords: Appalachian People How they got Water back in the day, Appalachian Story telling, Appalachian culture, Appalalchian History, Donnie Laws, ways of getting Water, Wells, Cisternsl, Early Appalachia, Appalachia people, Water Springs, Mountain people, Pumps, Drinking water, H2O, Ground water, finding water, How to get water, water in Appalachia

Id: Ex8O5tshEMs

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 08 2022