<![CDATA[Somerset Well Drilling - Blog]]>Thu, 23 Jan 2025 17:44:00 -0800EditMySite<![CDATA[SOmerset Well Drilling Commercial]]>Thu, 19 May 2016 11:37:05 GMThttps://www.somersetwell.com/blog/somerset-well-drilling-commercial8998850
]]><![CDATA[Out of necessity, pioneers took risks in well-digging]]>Mon, 04 Apr 2016 19:39:36 GMThttps://www.somersetwell.com/blog/out-of-necessity-pioneers-took-risks-in-well-diggingI turned to William Bell Mitchell. In his 1915 "History of Stearns County," he describes digging wells and obtaining water as something rather simple and efficient: “Pure water is readily obtained by means of wells, the depth varying from 15 to 75 feet, in a few locations it has been found necessary to go to a depth of 100 feet before a reliable flow of pure water is obtained. Most of the wells are in sand, gravel and pebbles, but some pass through till and hardpan. In many localities are springs, which furnish a constant and accessible supply of water which cannot be excelled for purity. Of the wells of the more moderate depths many are spring-fed and the supply of water seldom fails even in driest weather.”
He makes it all sound so simple.
I returned to an interview I did with my parents in 1982 for first-hand information. My dad, Henry Salzl, described his experience digging wells as not a simple endeavor:  He said he and his brother-in-law Frank Jochum once dug a well 50 feet deep by hand. He said where his family settled in St. Martin, water was difficult to find.
“You had to be sure the well would produce enough water for everything that needed water," he said. "Sometimes you had a heck of a time finding that much water.
“When digging a well for my parents, we put a 2-by-4-foot post in each of the four corners," he said. "As we dug the dirt out, the corner posts slowly traveled down. Then side boards were set between them. When it got too deep to shovel, the dirt was loaded into a carrying bucket and hauled out by windlass — a winch, lifted out of the hole. The person on top (the assistant or tender) pulled the full buckets up.”
The person outside the well cranked the buckets of dirt up and lowered an empty bucket back down. Notice the huge pile of dirt pulled out of the well. The man at the top was also the lookout man, making sure the person in the well was safe. (Photo: Marilyn Salzl Brinkman)
My dad said he crawled in and out of the well by using a ladder and a rope. The hoist at the top had a lock on it.
“The buckets balanced one another; as an empty one was let down, its weight helped to raise the full one, which passed it as it was drawn up. We lowered curbings (supporting structures). The curbings were made of wood and had to be smaller than the hole so they would slide down. More were added from the top as they went deeper.”
Every digger was in constant danger that something might drop into the well on him — a  careless move by the tender on the rim above might cause a tool to fall in; a weakened rope might break; a faulty ratchet might release and cause the loaded bucket to fall; misjudgment of the depth by the assistant might allow the rope to play out too rapidly and strike the digger below; or there might be a faulty attachment between the end of the rope and the bucket; the man at the top had to carry the bucket some distance away from the mouth of the well to empty it.
In my parents’ interview, they told of one well-digger who used quite large buckets. They were heavy and difficult to pull up. Eventually the winch gave way, a filled bucket fell back down the hole and hit the man, killing him.
For curious children who played near them, the open well was dangerous. Many pioneer stories tell of children and small animals falling into and drowning in open wells.


More information
A few days after my picture find, I located another untitled and undated file on digging wells. It was given to me many years ago when I was working on another project. In it, I found a similar description of well digging in an earlier day. The information verified my dad’s story, gave it credibility.
The article explained that after an early settler had determined the location of his well, either by use of a water witch or by a blind guess, he started to dig. He started the open well by digging in a circle about 3 feet in diameter with a spade. He continued with pick and shovel until he could no longer throw the dirt out of the top, after which he secured the services of a helper.
The well was sunk partway by a method called cribbing (my dad called it curbing), whereby a hole is lined as it is dug, thus preventing cave-ins. Two-by-10-inch planks were cut into 4-foot lengths and nailed securely in the corners.
A log post with a fork at the top was set on each side of the hole. A straight log was laid across the forks, with a handle attached to one end. A rope was fastened to the log roller. By turning the crank, the operator wound the rope around the roller and pulled up bucket after bucket of dirt as the hole was dug deeper.
A tripod winch erected over a well was designed to lift buckets of dirt from the well as someone in the well dug deeper into the dirt. Two buckets were used to remove dirt. When one was full and cranked out of the well, the second was lowered down to the person digging at the bottom of the well. (Photo: Marilyn Salzl Brinkman)
Only one man could work in the hole at a time because of the restricted work space. He shoveled the dirt into an ordinary bucket. When the desired depth was reached, the person digging the hole was hoisted out with the rope.
The well was completed with a drive-point (screen) securely screwed onto a pipe. This was lowered into the middle of the hole and pounded down with a maul. When the drive point punctured the aquifer (water-bearing layer) and water rose visibly in the hole, the well was practically completed. A pump head was screwed onto the pipe. It was manipulated up and down with a 3-foot handle. A platform was built over the hole about 6-foot square.

​Another well digging story
In “Life Stories Written by John Fleischhacker.” (St. Martin, 1981), Fleischhacker describes an open well used in about 1881 by his pioneer parents as dangerous, time-consuming and necessary. He wrote:
“The well that furnished the drinking water for the family, also for two cows they had, was an open well without a pump to get the necessary water. They used a wooden piece of branch sticking out to form a hook to hold in the handle of the pail when they had to get some water out of the open well. As the well was only 8 feet deep it wasn’t hard to get water when needed. But it had to be carried about 500 feet uphill to the house. … The 8-foot well was lined with rocks that formed a circle.”
The buckets were heavy enough that when lowered rapidly, “they sunk into the water with a gurgling sound,” he wrote.
Fleischhacker wrote that in 1901 the family dug a new closed well using hand labor. “It was 4x4 foot square by 42 feet deep. All the labor for digging and putting in the side wall planking was $15. … Digging in the hard clay subsoil was very hard work as all the clay had to be dug with a pick ax. It was very wet at that time and it must have been a very disagreeable job to work in the wet and sticky clay soil all day.
“Every morning before they could begin to work they had to take the water that had accumulated during the night out of the well and begin to dig in the mud that was sticking to the tools like glue and was very hard and heavy to work with. … As the subsoil was what they call blue clay and very hard, it all had to be picked or chiseled loose before it could be put into the bucket that was used to take the wet clay out of the well. A hand-powered turning winch was used to remove the clay from the well. It was done using two buckets. When full, one had to be cranked out of the well and the empty one was on the way back for another refill.”
The well pumped not only the water supply but also served as a refrigerator. Butter, milk and cream could be lowered into the well for cooling. A good well yielded 40-degree water year-round.
Open wells could be dangerous.
My dad said that, “In later years, the curbings were made of cement, like culverts, and professionals with the proper equipment dug the wells. It was progress,” he said.
My mother added that eventually most small towns had professional well diggers. She said, in those days, “Even if you had a farm, it was good if you had another trade with it. That’s how professional well-diggers started. They just helped their neighbors and soon they were considered professionals and dug wells for others and got paid.”
This column is the opinion of Marilyn Salzl Brinkman. Write to her at Brinkman1943@gmail.com or the St. Cloud Times, P.O. Box 768, St. Cloud, MN 56302.
​
]]><![CDATA[Somerset Well Drilling Commercial]]>Mon, 04 Apr 2016 19:19:37 GMThttps://www.somersetwell.com/blog/somerset-well-drilling-commercial
]]><![CDATA[Market House Geothermal Project]]>Mon, 04 Apr 2016 19:18:05 GMThttps://www.somersetwell.com/blog/market-house-geothermal-projectWithin walking distance from the Naval Academy and Main St. the "Market House" is a Multi-Vendor Facility located at 25 Market Space Annapolis, MD. This is the city's first geothermal project to date. The geothermal loop field consists of 22 - 1" x 360' Vertical Loops that will supply Market House with 40 ton of heating & cooling capacity. The loops are split up into 5 circuits and will supply water to the heat pumps provided by Fresh Air Concepts. To find out more on the project go to annapolis.gov. If you are in Annapolis, stop by Market House to grab a bite to eat and get cooled off.
]]><![CDATA[Franklin In The Field: Ten Things I Wish the Public Knew - #1-5]]>Sun, 28 Feb 2016 20:43:47 GMThttps://www.somersetwell.com/blog/franklin-in-the-field-ten-things-i-wish-the-public-knew-1-5
02/08/2016

A true story told by Mark Reeder, Director of Innovation & Field Marketing…
“In my job, I do a lot of airline travel. Although I’m generally a limited talker with whomever ends up next to me, I often get the question, ’So, what business are you in?’ From these and other random encounters with the general public, I’ve built up a sizable database of its perceptions of water wells and the groundwater industry.
What follows isn’t a revelation by any means, but I’m continually amazed at how little the general public knows about groundwater and the groundwater industry. Even end-users such as homeowners and farmers who have their own private water systems generally have little knowledge of how water gets to their tap. Given this, here’s a short series around the ten things I wish the public knew about our industry in hopes that it may help you better communicate with your customers. You’ll find the first five below, with the rest to follow in a subsequent post.
1. Chances are, your water comes from a well, even if you don’t know it.
I consistently hear: “I’m on city water; I don’t get my water from a well.” Actually, there’s a good chance you do. For example, I live in a good-sized city with several water sources, including a river and a couple of reservoirs. However, my city also has numerous large water wells, and a significant amount of our water is supplied from those wells.
2. Groundwater is important. So important, in fact, that we literally can’t live without it.
The general public has little appreciation of groundwater’s importance. Only 2.5% of the world’s water is freshwater and of that, 69% of that is locked up as ice at earth’s poles. What’s left is surface water and groundwater. Between the two, surface water comprises only 0.4% and the rest is groundwater. That’s not nearly enough surface water to supply the needs to humankind. Not only does much of our clean, fresh drinking water come from the ground, we have to have it to survive as a civilization.
3. Groundwater contractors are experts with unique professional knowledge.
Not only do groundwater contractors have to be good business people, they must also have very specialized technical expertise. Drilling contractors, for example, often maintain more than a million dollars worth of equipment, with more bells, whistles, levers, and buttons than most people can imagine. They have to understand geology and hydrology. Pump installers must have an outstanding working knowledge of electricity and hydraulics, and more often than not, electronic technology as well. Not everyone can do this job.
4. Groundwater expertise is different than plumbing expertise.
Not all groundwater contractors are plumbers, and not all plumbers are groundwater contractors. In fact, although some water well contractors and drillers provide plumbing services as part of their business, most of the time they don’t overlap. The groundwater industry requires a distinct knowledge base and skill set, and even different equipment. Think of it this way: someone who works on melting furnaces in foundries is not the same person who would work on the furnace in your home, and vice versa. Some of the underlying science and mechanics might be similar, but these are really two different jobs requiring distinct expertise.
5. We work under tight regulatory constraints.
Groundwater is a precious resource and, appropriately, obtaining a license to access and drill into it is a formidable task. In addition, nearly all states require water well contractors to receive a certain number of hours of continuing education each year in order to maintain that license. Of course, given the size and complexity of a drilling rig, there’s a significant safety and driver training component as well. We don’t just punch holes in the ground; we have to be well-trained and ensure regulatory compliance.”
]]><![CDATA[Franklin Electric Company History]]>Tue, 14 Oct 2014 19:29:26 GMThttps://www.somersetwell.com/blog/franklin-electric-company-history
]]><![CDATA[Tax Deductions Vs. Tax Credits]]>Tue, 15 Jul 2014 19:24:15 GMThttps://www.somersetwell.com/blog/tax-deductions-vs-tax-credits
]]><![CDATA[Grundfos SQE video]]>Wed, 07 Mar 2012 19:47:51 GMThttps://www.somersetwell.com/blog/grundfos-sqe-video
Features an intelligent Constant Water System that is easily installed, takes up very little room and is very affordable. End result, efficiency and savings.
]]>