Vincent Water Works

In January 1972 we moved our 10′ by 44′ house trailer from Virginia Mines near Hueytown to Woodstock in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama. From then until that summer, we shared a well that belonged to my aunt who owned Effoom’s Antiques next door.

Her wells were always awful. She lived at the bottom of a clay cliff that was constantly sliding down the hill and filling her wells with mud. I think she said she had to dig 2 wells because they kept filling up with mud. Her water was sometimes red in color.

Water pressure was awful because my house was uphill from hers. We immediately began searching for a better water supply. Mr. Perry, who owned the adjacent 40 acres, gave us permission to access an artesian spring on his property. The spring was only about a quarter mile from our house and, fortunately for us, slightly uphill from our house.

On June 15th, 1972, we dug a water line nearly 1,000 ft. with a ditch witch. The rest of the distance was dug by hand with the help of neighbors we hired as helpers. Perry had sold the property to Brown’s subdivision but Mr. Brown (Jackie Kline’s father-in-law) said we were welcome to access the spring until he sold the property the spring was on.

When we paid Alabama Power to connect the power for our trailer in August 1972, they also installed a meter near the well. The separate bill at that time was only $4 to $8 a month!

During this time I consulted a friend from church, Terry Largin, who was both a plumbing inspector for Jefferson County, Alabama and who served on the Greenpond Waterboard in Bibb County. He was later elected president of the waterboard. Terry was not only a master plumber, he was also trained in city water systems by the federal government and new the process of procuring and opening wells for city water.

I purchased two 36 in. well curbings from Barry George’s father and hauled them back home in my Uncle John’s little Datsun pickup (forerunner of Nissan). They weighed 1,500 lbs and the little truck was almost mashed flat but handled the load well. I dropped them off where Terry could roll them into place.

He manually dug out around the artesian well and dropped the first well curbing in place. It immediately sunk deep in the mud so we were fortunate to have a second curbing to place on top of it. He dug out the mud inside the first curbing as best he could but said the artesian spring kept filling it up so fast he couldn’t keep all the water pumped out enough to dig much.

Terry said his gas powered water pump threw water out an inch and a half discharge 7 or 8 feet before the stream fell to the earth. We don’t know how much water that was exactly but it was something akin to a fire hose. Terry estimated that the well was providing several hundred gallons of water an hour. As a test, he ran his pump for 24 hours and the water level never dropped more than a couple of feet.

To finish, he connected our water line and pump a little above ground level and knocked a hole in the well curbing closer to the top to let the let water out and prevent it from flowing over the top of the curbing. The spring never slowed and my aunt and I were never without water. The only problem we had was having to pump the water so far. It caused water pressure at our house to be low.

When the George’s moved in next door, they asked if they could have access to our water source. We gave permission and they connected the first of 3 houses on our little community water system. To help with water pressure, we added a second pump closer to the houses.

As more neighbors moved in, they asked for water access. We were really getting concerned about water pressure until the neighbor at the top of the hill said he had a 450 gallon tank. That’s where the second pump was installed. With his big tank at the top of the hill and the second pump we had better water pressure than folks in town.

No one ever asked us for permission to connect after that. It wasn’t until later that we found out the neighbor at the top of the hill had let others connect to his line (which was connected to Barry’s, which was connected to ours and Aunt Evelyn’s). Before we knew it, there were 6 homes supplied with all the water you could want, all at a total cost of less than $10 a month. Our neighbor at the top of the hill even paid the bill so the rest of us had free water.

I wish it could have lasted. It was a wonderful resource for us all but the well property belonged to a developer who needed to finish his housing development. Fortunately, that’s about the time the federal government approved a new well for the Woodstock / Greenpond communities.

We switched over to a public water system on June 25th, 1977. The little spring continues to run to this day as far as I know. No one can recall a time when it ever ran dry.