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The sweet water spring on the old home place never went dry, even in the drought years. That’s the word the old folks passed down to the younger one. The hillside spring was tapped a few decades before my Uncle Roy was born in 1890, and he took a special interest in it. When he was growing up, there were horses to care for, cows to milk, fences to keep up, and all the other tasks that came with a working farm at the turn of the century, but his brothers remembered he still found time to work at the spring. He looked after the little trickle of water that fought its way up through a sand vein to the surface for more than 50 years.

When I was a kid, I assisted him when he replaced clay tile at the spring with a section of iron pipe he had obtained from the C&EI railroad. The rail line ran nearby and the pipe was left over from a water line that had been put in. The line ran from a pumping station beside the Salt Fork River to a water tank a quarter mile or so north. Steam engines would stop there to refill their water tanks.

Uncle was very fond of that little spring, and predicted the time would come when people would appreciate clean water. He tended it like a garden, never letting any weeds grow around it, or fallen leaves and debris collect in the water. There was a small pool of clear water at the base of the spring, and on the hottest day of summer, cool water trickled into it.

Uncle Roy had been concerned when a few of the clay tiles shattered and dirt partially filled the broken sections. That’s when he spotted the piece of railroad pipe in the weeds by the trestle bridge that crossed the Salt Fork River. Moving the heavy pipe up the hillside through the woods was not an easy task. Uncle always carried a pack of camel cigarettes with him in his shirt pocket, and they were gone long before we reached the spring with the pipe.

It seemed a little strange to me to be doing all that work when the Salt Fork was only a hundred yards away, and running a stream of water much mightier than the spring. He explained the spring water was pure because it ran through a natural purifying sand vein. The same couldn’t be said for the Salt Fork, which was being polluted by a number of upstream sources.

We dug several feet back into the hillside, removing tile as we went, and then inserted the pipe in the remaining tile that ran to the source of the water. The pipe was a little smaller than the tile and Uncle used pieces of broken tile he called bats to fill in the crack between the pipe and the tile. When the pipe was covered with the dirt we had dug from the hillside, he placed a piece of screen wire over the end that extended out over the pool of water to keep the varmints out. At one time the spring had been fenced, but when the family quit running cattle, the fence was removed. A woodland path connected it to a well-used trail that followed the river.

Uncle remembered in the dry years of the 1930s, when it seemed it would never rain again, the spring furnished drinking water to neighborhood families when their dug wells went dry. Section crews from the C&EI also stopped there to drink and fill their water bottles when working on the railroad. There was a hedge post set in the ground near the spring and a granite ware dipper hung from a hook on the post for people to use. He recalled there had been a tin cup on the post for years, but it had become rusty and he replaced it with the dipper.

When he and his brothers were young, they kept minnows to fish with in a large, hole-filled bucket sunk in the pool below the spring. He recalled when he returned from France after World War I, the bucket was gone and the spring was in a bit of disrepair. He cleaned it up, and kept it that way until he died decades later.

After he died, the spring was neglected and eventually the land was sold. Years after Uncle Roy’s death, his youngest brother brought me a gift. “I thought you might like this,” he said. “It belonged to the keeper of the spring.” It was the long-handled dipper that hung from the hedge post. The old dipper was battered and some of the granite ware had given way to rust, but to me it was priceless.

Donald Richter’s column appears every other week in the Commercial-News. He is a member of the Vermilion County Museum Board.