Wooden Pumps for taking water from wells were in fairly common use throughout the Atlantic Provinces eighty or more years ago,but it is doubtful that there is even one in use today. They are gone like the wooden ships and may be seen only in museums like the Moncton Acadian Museum and and the New Ross Museum in Nova Scotia. A spirit of enterprise,skill and a great deal of hard physical labor was needed for the job of converting a spruce tree into a useful and dependable water pump.The art of making these pumps must be regarded now ans a lost art, for most of the men who made them and installed them are long gone.
Mister J.L .Curran of Charlottetown was one of the few men who could say he had seen the wooden pump make and used them. Mister Andre Hebert of Moncton and formerly of Bouctouche who had celebrated his 94 birthday in 1971 gave a very interesting description of the methods which his father and he used in the making of the pumps including the work a boring a hole straight through a log boring from each end and meeting in the middle. During the off season for farming, Mr.Hebert had said in order to obtain a little extra cash (something that was scarce is those days) the father and son would set out on a two or three weeks selling tour,taking along an express wagon ,their special pump tools and also a sufficient number of the hardwood valves,bolts etc for the making of perhaps a half dozen wooden pumps. If business on the trip turned out to be good, the blacksmiths and carriage builders in the communities could be pressed into service to make additional pump parts, once they had been furnished with models from which to work. As they travelled about New Brunswick, many miles from their home near Bouctouche, they found that many of the wells already were equipped with a bucket which was hung on a pulley and most familiar in New Brunswick was the well sweep which consisted of a bucket and a wooden rod attached to one end of a balanced pole, not to different design from the ancient shadoof of Egypt which as a means of raising water from the Nile for irrigation was in use as early as 1000 BC.
The first problem confronting the pump man was to convince the prospective customer that a wooden pump would provide an easier and faster way of drawing water from his well. If necessary in order to close a difficult sale, the pump man would guarantee that the pump which would make and install would pump a bucket of water with four good strokes. When the hour came to demonstrate the performance of the pump, Mister Hebert said, "I would make sure that those four strokes were really good strokes." So it seems the travelling pump man had to possess the soul of a salesman as well as that of a timberman and a hydraulic engineer. The contract price for the pump called for so much cash, maybe 15 or 20 dollars and board and lodging for man and beast. A visit was made to a nearby woodlot, where a suitable tall straight tree was picked and brought in ,from which to make the pump. White spruce was preferred, with fir a poor second as fir tended to contain what they called "faulty knots" which would allow the pump to leak. Any knots of this kind had to be bored out clean, and a dry pine plug was driven into the hole.
Only a good healthy live tree could be used to make a pump. The dry hard central part of the log was immediately bored out, and this permitted the outer green part of the wood to shrink inward without developing checks or splits. The art of boring lengthwise through a log to ake water pipes was not new when first it was undertaken in these Provinces. Actually the art was known in Europe as early as the year 1600 AD but it is interesting to speculate as to just who brought the art of pipe making and particularly the art of pump making to this country. Could it be the Acadians? Could it have been the Irish or Scots, or English? Today no person would would of undertaking to dig an open well by the old pick and shovel and hoist method, in which a hole around six feet square had to be dug down to the full depts, being temporary shored as the digging progressed, after which a permanent stone wall was built up from the solide rock level to the surface. My late husband once told me he remembered his father digging such a well. Among the men who made and intalled the wooden pumps in the south eastern part of New Brunswick were the Worthmans of Boundary Creek, and the Jardines and Scotts of the Petitcodiac area. Competition from other types of pumping systems eventually came in to bring an end to the day of the wooden pump. Fred Jones of Moncton produced a pump which employed an endless chain fitted with rubber discs which drew the water up through a pipe when a crank was turned. Then in swift succession came the iron factory made pumps and the windmill pumps, which are a story in themselves, but they are practically all gone now. When a well was required later, the proceedure was to get a well drilling crew to drive a casing pipe down in bed rock level, drilling on down usually with a four inch diameter hole until hopefully a source of water was found sufficent to supply an electric jet pump. The wooden pump and the dug well both belong to an era which has passed, but in looking back over this part of our history we cannot but be impressed at the energy,skill and perseverence with which those men undertook the job of winning the water from the ground. I found this article in the Societe Historique Acadienne and wanted to share it with you. I hope you have found it as interesting as I have.
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