Hydrohistorian
Digging well for watering stock. Loup City Farmsteads, Nebraska
Library of Congress · 1936 · Arthur Rothstein, for the Resettlement Administration
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34-004591-E No known restrictions on publication. Archive record ↗ · Rights
Source Archival record · verify at Library of Congress ↗
A rig, a truck, two cows and the horizon. This is the whole transaction that put several hundred thousand wells into the plains, repeated.
Shows: How ordinary drilling a well had become by the mid-thirties, and how little it took.
What this does not let you conclude: Depth, yield, or whether the water lasted. The permit file on this site records that a well was drilled; almost nothing records what it produced. May 1936.
Placed on
- Topic groundwater · plate
The archive’s record page
The archive’s record did not answer our check on 2026-10-12 (refused automated check, HTTP 403). Our copy above is unaffected; the credit stands. A person will look.