Water
I like, scratch that... I LOVE Victorian Architecture and on many occasions have passed some time looking at or drawing floor plans and designs of Victorian houses which someday I would love to live in. If I ever grow up and have a big house of my own, I would want it to be a Victorian, keeping many of the original features with only a few subtle modernizations such as central air.
While looking at some plans online, I found one for a country house which has specified in the plans an 8,000 gallon cistern which collects rainwater from the slate roof. It claims that rainwater from a slate roof is "pure and clean, free from color, and used with ice in summer is better and healthier than well water."
Many homes back in Kansas had cisterns and wells; the farmhouse where I grew up actually had a system of eaves which fed into a cistern which you could pump manually. Little metal cups suspended by chains would pulley around the inside of the well when you rotated the handle, and one-by-one, the metal buckets would dip down to the water at the bottom of the well, rise up and dump the water into a compartment which would then drain out through a faucet on the side of the well. It was always fascinating to me and I loved to pump the water after a good rain. I even had a song for it, which simply enough consisted of the words "I've been pumpin' water for my family" which I would just sing repeatedly. But it was always just an idle novelty on our farm; I don't recall it ever actually being used for anything until one day we started dumping trash down it, and eventually removed the well, or it was carried off in a storm or something similar.
I guess it just now dawned on me that someone at some point in time probably relied on that well, or at least many such similar well, to procure their drinking water. In 2008, here we are buying bottled water imported from Fiji, or at the least, filling up our Styrofoam cups from the Sparkletts dispenser. We buy contraptions to filter the water that comes out of our kitchen sinks, and some people even install purification systems in their homes.
It's hard to imagine just drinking rain water that had fallen onto your roof and travelled through a series of metal tubes where it sat in a concrete cavern underground, but that's what people used to do; at least some of them. I'm sure the rich always had a way of obtaining pure, crystal-clear water but for those with farmer ancestors like myself, my genes probably have been dampened by a lot of rainwater.
While looking at some plans online, I found one for a country house which has specified in the plans an 8,000 gallon cistern which collects rainwater from the slate roof. It claims that rainwater from a slate roof is "pure and clean, free from color, and used with ice in summer is better and healthier than well water."
Many homes back in Kansas had cisterns and wells; the farmhouse where I grew up actually had a system of eaves which fed into a cistern which you could pump manually. Little metal cups suspended by chains would pulley around the inside of the well when you rotated the handle, and one-by-one, the metal buckets would dip down to the water at the bottom of the well, rise up and dump the water into a compartment which would then drain out through a faucet on the side of the well. It was always fascinating to me and I loved to pump the water after a good rain. I even had a song for it, which simply enough consisted of the words "I've been pumpin' water for my family" which I would just sing repeatedly. But it was always just an idle novelty on our farm; I don't recall it ever actually being used for anything until one day we started dumping trash down it, and eventually removed the well, or it was carried off in a storm or something similar.
I guess it just now dawned on me that someone at some point in time probably relied on that well, or at least many such similar well, to procure their drinking water. In 2008, here we are buying bottled water imported from Fiji, or at the least, filling up our Styrofoam cups from the Sparkletts dispenser. We buy contraptions to filter the water that comes out of our kitchen sinks, and some people even install purification systems in their homes.
It's hard to imagine just drinking rain water that had fallen onto your roof and travelled through a series of metal tubes where it sat in a concrete cavern underground, but that's what people used to do; at least some of them. I'm sure the rich always had a way of obtaining pure, crystal-clear water but for those with farmer ancestors like myself, my genes probably have been dampened by a lot of rainwater.
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