Wood Family Cistern
by Andrea Wood
My son, Darrell was three years old when we moved to Boerne and into our home built in 1908 on James Street. As soon as I bought the house I was hired to teach science at Boerne High School. My principal, Sam Champion, was so considerate knowing I was a single mom he offered to rally the football team in July to help me move my furniture in! Everyone I met was very friendly and helpful. At my first faculty meeting many staff members commiserated and offered help to locate one of our dogs who escaped when a boy unwittingly opened the gate to retrieve a Frisbee not knowing there were adventurous dogs in the back yard of this long-empty house. There was a lot of work to be done on this home that had been neglected for many years between the time the Birdsong family lived there with four boys and our little family of two moved in.
It was a great place though for one little boy, a cat and two big dogs to roam and play! At first there were piles of fire ants and almost no grass, but that changed the first year along with laying brick walkways and getting a clubhouse. The whole yard was an adventure though with an old carriage house (now our garage), and an old smokehouse, an original wash house and a chicken house. There was a lot of yard work to do each week, and each month projects of painting, repairing and improving all over.
One summer Darrell and I made our usual trek to my cousin's farm in Kansas to spend 4th of July. We had been gone less than a week and had left a key with a neighbor and the pets well supplied. When we arrived back home the first thing to do was check on the dogs to be sure they were alright and spend some time in the yard with them. It was late on a Friday afternoon as we walked around to the east side of the back yard and were startled to find a secret about this very old home. As we rounded the corner of the house we saw that just two feet from the walls between a bedroom and the living room the ground dramatically sinking several feet lower than the rest of the yard! I have never seen a sinkhole, except in pictures and I was panic-stricken that I was about to see our house in one. I ran inside scared everyone might already be gone for the weekend and there'd be no one at City Hall to come out to look at this and calm my fears.
So relieved, two men came right over. They were sure it wasn't a sink hole but they were otherwise almost as dumbfounded as I was. They suggested it was an old well, but the well is on the west side. Eventually as the ground quickly fell in more, we saw it was an underground cistern six feet in diameter, lined with limestone rock. Apparently many decades back when it was not being used someone laid strips of cedar wood across it with corrugated metal roofing and covered it with dirt. Over time the dirt had become about a foot deep and the metal and wood had rusted and rotted until the weight was insupportable. There is a piece of clay pipe visible where the water had been gathered from the roof long ago and emptied into the cistern where it could be used.
We have no idea how deep how deep this cistern is even yet, at least nine feet but probably much deeper. On a few very rainy weeks when Boerne has had a foot of rain we've seen it fill to the brim then empty into the ground below having lost it's seal to hold the water. It is amazing to imagine the men digging this hole and to see the wear of water on the rock lining carefully put in place by people who settled this area and were truly strong, independent folks dependent on their environment and community.
