Well drilling in Molotschna 2

With apologies for the long gap between the previous post and this one and the general slow pace of posting to Buller Time the past month, permit me to wrap up our short detour into well drilling in Molotschna colony.

Several aspects of Johann Cornies’s account in the previous post (here) deserve special attention.

1. Cornies reports that he used a ground auger built of wood to drill the wells. In fact, he states that he “invented” or, probably better, built this wooden ground auger. We have all seen an auger before: it has a central pole and a corkscrew. An auger used to drill a hole in the ground probably looked at least something like the modern post-hole digger pictured to the right.

Cornies contrasts his ground auger with a heavy iron one that the government had. It seems most probable that the wooden part of Cornies’s auger was the shaft, not the auger itself. Although it is possible that Cornies constructed both parts out of wood, I cannot imagine a wooden auger lasting long under this type of usage.

We should probably picture the auger shaft not as a single piece but a as series of standard-length pieces that would be added one after another to go deeper and removed as the auger was pulled up.

2. Cornies’s reference to the smaller crew needed to operate his ground auger, as opposed to an iron one, leaves little doubt about the operation of the ground auger: it was not motorized or operated by horse power; rather, it was powered strictly by human labor. One might imagine an auger with two or, more likely, four bars across the top and men walking around and around in a circle to drill the auger deeper into the ground.

3. Cornies provides no evidence about the diameter of the well, and I am unable to find information in other sources that might provide an idea of the average well of that era’s diameter. All we know is that people of that time and place typically lined their wells with wood to keep the sides from caving in. Cornies explains that deep wells required “especially thick planks.” On the basis of this evidence, it seems highly likely that the wells being drilled were more than a foot or two in diameter.

4. The process, we may further imagine, was a matter of drilling the auger down into the ground so that the soil was loosened, then periodically pulling up the shaft and auger so that either (1) the dirt was lifted to the top by the auger and removed or (2) men were let down into the well to place the loose dirt into buckets that were then hoisted to the top and emptied. The latter, of course, would be an option only if the well had a significantly wide diameter.

5. All that remains to discuss is the depths of the wells. Cornies reports that he found water at the following depths:

• Tashchenak: 13 arshins and 9 arshins
• Orta Otluk: 13 arshins, 26 arshins, and 21 archins
• the Ovrakh of the Orta Otluk, at its peak: 33 arshins, 15 arshins, and 41 arshins

According to online sources, a Russian arshin (арши́н) is roughly comparable to what we think of as a yard; to be precise, an arshin is 71.12 centimeters, or 2.3 feet. Knowing this conversion enables us to translate the well depths into terms more familiar to us.

• Tashchenak: 29.9 feet and 20.7 feet
• Orta Otluk: 29.9 feet, 59.8 feet, and 48.3 feet
• the Ovrakh of the Orta Otluk, at its peak: 75.9 feet, 34.5 feet, and 94.3 feet

Based on a final piece of information provided by Cornies, we can also calculate how long it would have taken to drill to these depths. Cornies notes in his first paragraph that a crew of eight men can drill 10–11 sazhen on a “day as is short as is normal for this time of year,” that is, November. The Russian sazhen (саже́нь) was about 7 feet, so Cornies’s crew of eight could drill 70–77 feet a day. That is actually quite impressive, a testament to the efficiency of the ground auger and the efforts of its operators.

It is easy to hold the mistaken impression that the Molotschna residents were dependent on streams, rivers, ponds, and lakes for their daily water needs, for the settlers and their livestock (but not irrigation), as Cornies puts it. In fact, humans have dug and drilled water wells for centuries, even millennia. That our Mennonite ancestors did the same in Molotschna colony should come as no surprise.