No, your reply wasn’t catty.No, we call wells wells and boreholes boreholes
Our borehole is only about 8" diameter bore IIRC - big enough for the pump to be lowered into, and 300 feet deep. It was drilled out. The well up the road that I have extraction rights for is about 36" diameter and was dug by hand a long time ago and water rises to within a few feet of the top.
We’ve had several types here over time. The really old ones from the 1800s and before were dug by hand and we’re about 3 or 4 feet in diameter and water was drawn by a wooden bucket. The next wells from the early 20th century were drilled and were about 8 inches diameter as you describe, lined with a concrete culvert, and water was still drawn with a cylindrical metal well bucket on a rope such as I described. These were still common when I was a kid: we had one on our farm. Some people still have them
Also about the turn of the 20th century smaller wells were becoming common that were drilled about 2 to 3 inches in diameter and fitted with a hand pump. The downside of these were that they had to be primed before use every time you wanted to draw water. Several of my family and friends still had these when I was a kid for alternate water sources during power outages. A lot of people still do:
Then around the1920s when electricity became commonplace there was a shift to electric pumps still on top of the same drilled 2 or 3 inch diameter wells the hand pump had used. They just needed the pump and aa water tank (usually about a 35 to 50 gallon capacity) hooked up to the household plumping. These were later replaced in the 1970s with more modern jet pumps that no longer needed a tank. Loads of people still use the jet pumps and wells as their primary water Source.
Lastly there’s everybody’s dream: an artesian well. Water flowing from a faraway underground reservation thousands of years old. There were three small ones of these in the village where I grew up. Before I started 1st grade two,of them had dried up (after about 200 years of flow) The last one was across the road from us in my Great Aunt’s front yard and after Hurricane Camille left most of the state without electricity in 1969 there was a line there to get water 24 hours a day for weeks until power was finally restored. It also finally dried up earlier this century.
Here’s a modern one with a tap (all of ours always just ran free)
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