- Our Old Pump
Oysterville prides itself on having the best water on the peninsula. Actually, it’s the best water anywhere. It has no taste, no smell, no color. It’s pure and wet and plentiful. We love it and it’s what we bottle to put in our emergency provisions stash, what we carry in our water containers in the car, and what supplies all our indoor water needs here at home. We have no reason to pay money for bottled water. Thank goodness, because who knows where that came from!
When my mother was a girl, the water for our house came from a pump in the front yard and rain barrels on the roof. Then, sometime in the 1930s, the Andrews family put in a well across the road from the Oysterville Store and the Oysterville Water Company was formed. Our old relic of a pump, like many others in town, became yard art, and we proudly hooked up to “city water.” It was every bit as good as our own had been and an electric pump, not a hand pump, kept that water flowing.
The Water Company’s pump was maintained (with chewing gum and bailing wire, some said) by one of the Andrews men and by Eddie Freshley. By the time I moved up here in 1978, Eddie’s wife, Lucille, was keeping the books for the Water Company and the price was $5.00 per household per year.
In the early ’80s, the Oysterville Water Works was formed and our ancient village system was upgraded. The old well was closed down, the people of Oysterville and the folks up on the ridge to the west combined forces and resources, increased the capacity of the new well at the end of Douglas Drive, and formed a Board of Directors.
We all invested money in the system, each of us contributing a base amount, and our water rates climbed from the ridiculous five dollar amount to a modest hundred or so a year. We even have a volunteer water engineer, Mark Clemmens, who goes to regional and State water meetings and workshops, keeps us apprised of new regulations, and oversees the system’s water testing that goes on each month.
Our water continues to be THE BEST! And so, when necessary clean-outs of tanks and pipes occur, and our water turns muddy-looking for a day or two, we offer no complaints. (Well, most of us don’t. There’s one in every crowd, as they say.) We know that we are lucky beyond belief! Hooray for Oysterville water!
When we lived in Nahcotta we believed that the water there was the best we’d ever had. The water in Ilwco is terrible. We have a filter on the refrigerator. I am jealous.
Nahcotta water is hard to beat, but O-ville comes close; As a child, I lived in Chinook and Ilwaco. The water in both of those towns is BAD, and I never really cared for Seaview or LB either!
Nahcotta was IS wonderful and Ilwaco’s varies from bad to worse so we have to filter it. One of the things I don’t like about Ilwaco. Seaview’s and LB’s taste fishy.
LOL, yeah sure ya betcha, same groundwater different place. There are some notorious places on the beach, probably subsurface peat layers between old dunes. Better hope it doesn’t stop raining.
thinks we don’t have to worry about the rain stopping. Groundwater is better than surface water. It’s that simple.
One and the same.
And when it’s filtered through all that sand, and purified by all that Salt, it is as good as running Inland water through a $10,000 filter system! I have to add 40 lbs of Salt to my ground-water filter in Kelso, every 7-10 days, and it still isn’t as good as any Well water I ever had at the beach!