Memories of Charlton County - by Gibson and Mays Back to Table of Contents 27. THE WATER TANK IN THE MIDDLE OF MAIN STREET (Pp 50-51) When I was a young
man I worked at any job that I could find and most of them at that time paid about fifty cents a day. One of my jobs was helping put up a water tank in the middle of Main Street near Stapleton's Drug Store. There had been a small tank that had pipes to several houses but the city needed a larger one. Emory Dean contracted the job and Mack Wildes, R. D. Bowman and I worked for him. We put down four pilings about 10 by 12 inches thick, using a mule to
help us get them in the ground. Then we braced them and put sills on top. Then we put flooring on the sills and that made the bottom of the tank. Then we built a platform around the outside to stand on, and put up the wall of the tank with tongue and groove boards. We finished it by putting a roof on top, just like the covering of a house. Mack and I did most of the work. He was so particular. Everything had to be done just right when he worked on it. I scared him once
when I dropped a board from the roof onto the floor of the empty tank and it made an awful racket. He said "What happened?" He thought something was coming apart. Mack was a surveyor but when he wasn't doing that he worked on carpenter jobs. After we finished building the tank we began laying pipe and started digging our way through the A.C.L. park where the post office is now, to the back of H. J. Davis' store. But V. A. Hodges, the roadmaster, stopped us. We
had not gotten permission from him to lay the pipe, for the railroad owned the park. Colonel A. S. McQueen, who was probably the city's attorney, came to the park when he saw that the work had stopped. As we were discussing it, Mr. Hodges absent-mindedly picked up one of the workmen's wrenches and Colonel McQueen said "Now you've got him! Now you've got him! He's trying to carry away your tools!" Mr. Hodges put the wrench down and gave permission for the work to
continue. The little water tank was torn down after the new one was built. I also helped put up a water tank at Jim Gowen's house. It wasn't as large as the one in Main Street. It worked fine but a year or two later the water smelled bad and wasn't fit to drink. They got up there and checked it and found that yellow jackets had fallen in and drowned and ruined the water. It had to be cleaned out before they could drink the water again. | 
