Now & Then | Going over the hill to fetch a pail of water

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

— I suppose it is obvious that I like to tell reminiscing stories. I may have picked that up from my mother. My mom quite often fell into telling a story about things that happened as she was growing up north of Bentonville. She had a story about going over the hill to the spring on the back side of their family farm to bring water to the house for drinking and cooking. On one of those jaunts, she encountered a copperhead snake.

She was scared almost out of her wits, but she began pounding the copperhead with rocks she picked up by the path. The next morning, she trekked back over the hill to see if her snake had survived. Shemust have bombarded the poor thing with a boatload of rocks. Sadly, or not, the copperhead was deader’n a hammer. Mom also liked rhymes. One of the first rhymes that I learned from her was “Jack and Jill went up the hill, to fetch a pail ofwater. Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after.”

Now that one never made sense to me. All the wells and springs I knew of were downhill from the house, not up. I still don’t understand Jack and Jill going up the hill.

It has been awhile since I went up the hill, or down, or over the hill, to fetch a pail of water. Sometimes these days I am called out to the farm to check on the well pump, maybe to fix a water-logged tank; but it has been a long time since I even thought about fetching a pail of water. Usually when I need water, I just go to the faucet. There’s not much fetching to it. But I’m thinking, just 50 or 60years ago, going to fetch a pail of water was one of the most common everyday things people did. In the 1930s and 1940s around Pea Ridge, whether you were a banker or a laborer, having water normally meant going to the well or spring tofetch it.

When I was a small boy, I thought I was really becoming a big boy once I could fetch a pail of water.

Of course I didn’t have to go over the hill, I just walked out to the well, took hold of the well rope, let the bucket down into the well until it hit the water, turned over and filled; then I would draw it up with the rope and pulley that were fixed over the well.

One of the challenges for a little boy like me came just as the bucket topped the well opening. Either I had to hold the rope with one hand and set the bucket to the side, or tie the rope around something, or I might drop the full bucket back into the well. That was a no no when that happened, which it did a time or two. But, when I got the hang of it, I could pour the water into my pail, and carry it to the house, trying not to slosh out my water on the way, and show Mom what a big boy like me could do. We always kept a metal dipper in our water pail in the kitchen. I still believe water tasted better in those days than it does today, possibly because of the metal dipper, or maybe our well just had better water. After Dad and Johnnie moved from the farm into town, he would still bring jugs of water from the old farm well, and keep it in the refrigerator for drinking.

He just thought it was better water.

When the early settlers first began coming to the Pea Ridge area in the 1830s, one of the first things they looked for would be good springs of water. In fact, I’m pretty sure that Pea Ridge is where it is today because of two springs, from which early families like the Fosters and Wallaces got good water. One of those is Morrison Spring, which supplies the main headwaters of Otter Creek, located just north of town. The other is a smaller spring located on Green Street, west of Pickens. That one would have been just down the hill from the Foster house, which stood across from today’s Pea Ridge Outlet Store. The Foster family opened a general store at the top of the hill, where the Outlet Store stands. So, unlike Jack and Jill, the Fosters would have gone down the hill and through the wood to fetch their pails of water.

Actually I don’t even have a proper pail for fetching water now. A real water pail was a metal bucket, about three gallons in size, with a sturdy heavy wire bail.

Everything now is plastic.

My buckets today are either one-gallon plastic ice cream buckets or two-gallon plastic pails, or five-gallon plastic buckets that onceheld paint or oil or insecticide. None of them would make a proper water pail.

As water system technologies have improved, bucket technology has descended into the tank. They really don’t make good water buckets or milk pails like they used to.

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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history.

He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Community, Pages 5 on 03/09/2011