There's a wet spot at the bottom of one of our fields, right on the edge where the field meets the woods at the bottom of the hill, that we always suspected was a spring. This fall we dug into it with the backhoe to find out.
Down in the trench, standing in slowly moving water, was an old square wooden box made of planks. It's weathered and split along the top, and it sits right where the water comes up. Our best guess is that it's an old well casing made out of wooden planks, built long ago to keep the sides of the hole from collapsing. It likely predates plastic piping, and probably iron pipe too, which would put it somewhere in the 1800s to early 1900s.
That's only a guess. We can't tell its age from looking, and we're not experts. We used it as it was for the cattle's water for a while, and then decided to develop it and improve it into a more dependable water source. If it is a wooden well casing, it's a reminder that this ground had a use long before us. Join the Firm Foundation Farm email list to follow along as we develop this spring. Have you ever come across something old on your land?