STEPHENVILLE, Texas (AP) - Carroll McInroe has vivid memories of the 1950s drought and his father’s desperate search for water.
“Dad had lost the cotton crop,” McInroe told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (https://bit.ly/1pHn3ck). “He had lost the peanut crop. If he lost the cattle, he lost the ranch. It was as simple as that.”
As the drought intensified, McInroe remembers tagging along with his father to Lost Creek, the last place on the family farm north of Stephenville that still had water.
McInroe’s father started digging near where a spring fed the creek in the hope of finding its source. When the tractor got stuck, they found the old well, McInroe said.
With the help of local teenagers, they dug into the creek bed and hit pay dirt, unearthing the hand-dug well - with tool marks along the side - that appeared to have been there for centuries.
It quickly filled with spring water and helped keep the farming and ranching operation afloat. McInroe’s father named it “Green Hole” because of the spring-fed well’s color.
“My dad got a big old hand pump, and we would nearly pump it dry every day,” McInroe said. “It was very dependable. It saved us during that drought.”
When the drought broke and the creek was running once again, the well disappeared. But McInroe never forgot. He would dig it up again after returning home from the Army in the early 1970s.
And even when it disappeared a second time, the old well stayed fresh in his mind.
“I’ve been thinking about that old well since I was 5 years old,” McInroe said. “It was so impressive to me I have never forgotten it.”
With the ongoing drought tightening its grip on North Texas, McInroe decided to tap the well once again. He flew back to Texas late last month from his home in Spokane, Washington, and with the help of an excavator, the “Green Hole” was reborn.
By the following Sunday, it was filled with water - just like 60 years ago.
McInroe, however, is seeking more than another source of water for a rancher who leases the land.
He wants to find out the well’s age.
“I’m just dying for it to be 6,000 years ago, and I admit that,” McInroe said.
In the 5-acre pasture just above the creek are indications that people have been coming to this watering hole for ages.
McInroe has found old stone-carving tools and arrowheads, as well as stones that appeared to be used as fire pits. He has wondered whether a small village was once next to the creek.
But it will take time and money to answer those questions. The age won’t be easy to determine because the most important piece of evidence was lost when the well was dug up in the 1950s.
“Since they excavated it out back in the 1950s, it’s hard for me tell you precisely how old it is,” said Charles Frederick, a geoarchaeologist and research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He explained that there is no sediment around the well to help determine its age.
“The thing we have to rely upon is where it is on the landscape,” said Frederick, who was on hand when the well was excavated. “The fact that it is associated with the modern channel would suggest it is associated with the most recent regime of stream filling and movement.
“On most streams in Texas, that dates to the last 1,000 years to the last 1,500 years. Some of them are younger and go back only 600 years ago.”
The well shows all the signs of being dug by hand with stone tools.
“This has all the hallmarks of a water well,” Frederick said. “It is a vertical shaft that doesn’t have a flared side - and the marks on the side . appear to be tool marks.”
Even if it doesn’t date to the Stone Age, it is an interesting find, Frederick said.
“We don’t see these types of things very often,” Frederick said. “They’re just uncommon. And it’s interesting to see how people adapted to this landscape.”
Eventually, McInroe would like students at nearby Tarleton State University to have access to the site and would like high school students visit.
Answering questions about the age of the well and the stones found in the pasture will require more work, and McInroe said he is willing to do that.
McInroe hopes to have Frederick come back to the ranch this fall or winter to look for archaeological sites buried in the pasture. McInroe dreams of finding remnants of an old village underneath the field.
“I just love trying to solve the mystery,” McInroe said. “Who did it and when did they do it?”
And if the site turns out to date back hundreds of years - instead of thousands - that’s fine with McInroe.
“Whatever it turns out to be is OK by me,” McInroe said. “The truth is the truth.”
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Information from: Fort Worth Star-Telegram, https://www.star-telegram.com
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