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Envision having to tote all the water you needed for drinking, cooking, bathing, washing clothes, scrubbing floors and cleaning pots, pans and dishes from a script-pumped well 50 feet outside your back door.
Winter and summer, that’s how it was for James Harris, who in 1824 built the company where my wife and I live, and for his spouse Prushia and their eight kids.
On below-zero mornings James would dribble a rock tied to a rope down the well to smash the ice. In late summer the well might run dry, leaving him in hopes that his neighbor had water in his well and was complaisant to share.
But let’s fast forward seven decades, to a exchange that must’ve seemed miraculous.
I have an 1895 photo of the house Harris built, a four-just Federal-style structure with a hip roof and two big chimneys.
By then, Walter Leonard, who lived on Meadow Picture Farm at South Main and Reservoir streets, owned the Harris position succeed, which he rented to two families, upstairs and down.
Source: Wicked Local