Another Brick-Lined Discovery

Around the time we discovered the brick walk, we also found the original cistern.  It is located several feet from the back porch and the exterior entrance to the basement.  The opening was covered by a heavy metal lid, but the brick and mortar around the cover and its frame were suffering.  In mid-March (more crazy-good weather) Rob fashioned a flexible ladder and submerged to assess.  He found a brick-lined space as pristine as the day it was built--except for 50 wheelbarrow loads of slag from the coal furnace!

The cistern is about 8 feet deep and 8 feet in diameter.  There are pipes exiting the space moving in various directions and at various depths, and the space for the pump is still present.  Originally, the cistern would have collected rain water from the downspouts and supplied the house with water...including drinking water.

Our plan for the cistern is to return it to a rain water collection vessel for lawn and garden irrigation.  But all that slag had to be removed.  Rob enlisted the help of a friend and they removed bucket after bucket of debris.  While the vast majority of the debris was slag, we did recover an intact large crockery jug, several brown glass quart-sized Clorox bottles, and several glass bottles in various shapes and sizes.  Only one or two were broken!  Perhaps the most interesting find was an old bottle of Milk of Magnesia with the medicine still inside!  (If you've ever tasted MoM, you know why it ended up in the cistern!)

At the end of the day, the cistern was emptied and ready for its next life.  A few weeks later, it was given a nice, new concrete support for its lid apparatus