Pioneer's Well

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm just the one passin' it along. Out on the Llano Ranch, in what would become Garza County, a group of workmen picked up their shovels in 1883 and started diggin'. Not just any hole in the ground, mind you.

They were goin' down. Five feet wide, square as a courthouse, and they weren't stoppin' until they hit forty feet. That's forty feet of hard work, hand over hand, stone by stone.

Because here's the part that'll make a mason raise an eyebrow: every single sandstone they pulled from that earth and stacked along those walls, they laid without a drop of mortar. No binding agent. Just patience, and skill, and the knowledge that people were going to be depending on this well for a long time to come.

They were right about that. That well worked for forty-five years. Now, it had a wood curb at the top, the kind every proper well deserves, the thing that keeps a person from stepping into the story the wrong way.

That curb did its job faithfully until 1937, when fire took it. The original, gone. But the well itself, that square pit of sandstone stacked dry and true, it was still standing.

Still there. So they built a replica curb, and the well kept its dignity. The county's first hand-dug rock-walled well.

Started by workmen in 1883, still worth remembering in 1968. Some things you dig, and they last.

What the marker says

County's first hand-dug rock-walled well. Dug 1883 by Llano Ranch workmen. Well is 5 feet square, 40 feet deep and lined with sandstones placed without the use of mortar. Original wood curb was destroyed by fire, 1937. Present curb is replica. Well was used 45 years. 1968