DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it — and friends, this one's worth every mile of road you drove to find it. For many years, water scarcity stunted settlements in La Salle County. You hear that word — stunted — and you ought to feel the weight of it.
The wells folks dug couldn't solve it. The windmills spinning in that South Texas wind couldn't solve it either. The land had promise, but without water, promise is just a dry dream blowing through the brush.
Then came 1910. Right here at this site, on his own ranch, a man named Joseph Cotulla decided to go looking for water where nobody else had thought to look — or maybe thought to look and didn't dare. He drilled down.
Past the caliche, past whatever lay beneath that, past the point where any reasonable person might have called it a fool's errand. Two thousand, two hundred feet. That's the number on the marker, and you sit with that a moment.
Two thousand two hundred feet straight down into the earth. And what Joseph Cotulla — born in 1844, died in 1923 — what that man found down there was artesian water. Not water you had to pump.
Water that came up on its own, as if the land had been holding its breath all those years and finally let it out. The well provided amply for his household, his livestock, his irrigated fields. Ample.
That word would have sounded like a miracle in La Salle County in 1910. And the story didn't stay on Cotulla's ranch. His success led the city of Cotulla to bore its own artesian wells, and from there came prosperous civic growth.
One man, one site, two thousand two hundred feet — and a whole county started breathing again. Joseph Cotulla's well right here kept flowing for fifty-two years. It wasn't capped until 1962.
Fifty-two years of water rising up out of the deep dark earth, doing exactly what it was put there to do. Some wells just know their purpose.
What the marker says
For many years, water scarcity stunted settlements in La Salle County. Wells and windmills failed to solve the problem. In 1910 at this site, Joseph Cotulla (1844-1923) explored and brought in artesian water from a depth of 2200 feet. Situated on his own ranch, the well provided amply for his household, livestock, and irrigated fields. His success led the city of Cotulla to bore its own artesian wells and generate prosperous civic growth. Joseph Cotulla's well at this site flowed for 52 years, until capped in 1962.