Скачать или смотреть Settlers Mocked His “Oversized” Rain Barrel—Until It Saved the Garden in a Drought

Willamette Valley, Oregon Territory, March 1862.
While every settler in the valley raced to complete their spring preparations before planting season, Jacob Hartwell was still hauling massive cedar planks up from the creek bottom in his sixth week of construction. His neighbors called it excessive. They called him wasteful. He was building a rain collection cistern that stood 8 ft tall and 4 ft in diameter, holding 320 gallons when full, more than six times larger than standard frontier water storage. The massive wooden structure consumed 280 board-feet of precious cedar, requiring careful selection and steam-bending techniques that most settlers considered unnecessary for simple rain collection. Thomas Brennan shook his head, saying that cistern used more timber than his entire fencing project. Local blacksmith Samuel Porter, who had fabricated barrel hoops for 30 homesteads in these valleys, declared 50 gallons plenty for any garden. Settlement leader Thomas Brennan predicted that come summer, Hartwell would wish he had used that cedar for barn expansion and less for storing water that fell from the sky for free.