| "An interesting sidelight upon the building of the water tower is the story of John Woida, a saloon keeper. The tower was built with license money from the saloons in town and Woida, feeling that he had in a great measure, personally paid for the improvement, said boastfully; "I built the steeple on the town, I want to climb up and have a look at it." Now Woida was a corpulent individual and the tower was tall and not easy to climb, so some of the men bet old John that he couldn't climb it. But climb it he did, one evening after supper. He got up all right and looked around, but when he attempted the descent his nerve failed him and he pleaded for help. Four of the interested spectators: J.E. Young, Jim Anderson, Ora Johnson, and George Reisner went up to help him. They tied a rope around his rotund stomach and let him down the outside, kicking and sprawling like a big spider on the end of a cobweb. His cries were heard all over town and everyone came out to see the sport. A good time was had by all except, perhaps, John Woida." --History of Sherwood by Ronald Sherk, 1936. |
3 comments:
How come people built watertowers for their water? Why didn't they have wells?
Now that is a good question. I believe it had to do with pumping the water up high, getting a bit of a surplus and then with the water up high, it had water pressure to get it around the town. There was a pipe that was rigged from the water tower to a room in the Morback house which Shelby called "The Water Room." The Morback House was the first one with running water. What you say about this engineering question, J.C.?
You've got it just about right Lilly. Mr. Bowen told me that when he lived in Morback House it was his job to pump the water into the third floor storage tank so the H20 could flow freely from the kitchen tap. The water tower worked that way for Old Sherwood town. Being stored at a height of fifty feet, the water contained the "potential energy" necessary to stop a fire like what occurred in 1895. Alas, there was neither enough water nor energy to stop the fire of 1911 which destroyed the saloon, Sherwood's most important source of financial revenue in those days.
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