Those Kids Deserve Water Too: A History of the Patoka Lake Regional Water and Sewer District

By David L. Dahl

Fifty years ago, as America sent men to the moon, thousands in southern Indiana relied on water supplies little changed from pioneer days—cisterns or shallow wells often poor in quality, high in sulfur, or otherwise contaminated. During droughts when tanks ran dry, and wells failed, water for drinking, cooking, and bathing was trucked from springs or nearby towns. For decades, local leaders struggled to quench their communities’ thirst. In 1975, that all changed with the creation of the Patoka Lake Regional Water and Sewer District which provides drinking water to thirty-three water utilities and thousands of residential and commercial customers scattered across eleven counties in southwestern Indiana—an area that uniquely lacked readily available water. A new generation has grown accustomed to a ready supply of clean water. In Those Kids Deserve Water Too, author David L. Dahl tells how the district changed life for thousands of Hoosiers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jun 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781684700783

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DAHL

Copyright © 2019 David L. Dahl.

Interior Image Credit: Images come from five sources, Photo by David Dahl, Patoka Lake Regional Water and Sewer District, Bruce Heeke, Mark Eastridge PhD, Midwestern Engineers, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

ISBN: 978-1-6847-0077-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6847-0079-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6847-0078-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019904245

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date:  06/10/2019

To those men and women who shared a vision

Those kids deserve water too.

—Ed Pieper

Acknowledgments

Richard Burch and Doug Merkel shared a vision—to capture the history of the Patoka Lake Regional Water and Sewer District, and they asked me to help record this story for future generations. Richard and Doug, I thank you for your confidence and support and for your patience and guidance.

Thirty-five individuals agreed to be interviewed for this project. Cheerfully, they patiently endured my questions and shared personal photos, documents, and keepsakes. Their participation was crucial, and I could not have completed this without them—after all, it is their story:

James Burch

Ed Pieper

Mike Phillips

Louie Allstott

John Noblitt

John Wade

Mary Lou Schnell

Bruce Heeke

Doug Merkel

Shawn Kluesner

Jerry Allstott

Richard Burch

Robert Elliott

John Wetzel

Dwayne Walton

Doug Strange

Joe Gehl

Shari Hulsman

James Marshall

Kenneth Solliday

Dan Kluesner

Lorie Hubbs

Bill Hauser

Mike Kamp

Mark Eastridge

Terry Enlow

Darrell Newkirk

Joyce Lane

Linda Kellems

Teresa Campbell

Lisa Gehlhausen

Greg Nobel

Jerry Reynolds

David Burton

Steve Wilson

Less than two months after I met with Steve Wilson, he passed away. The news hit like a ton of bricks, as I had worked with him throughout my career and had always looked forward to my trips to the Bloomfield office of USDA’s Rural Development. Steve’s wife, Paula, graciously reviewed his transcript, and I can’t thank her enough.

Matt Clarke and Luke Woolems spent hours rummaging through old files and scanning documents. Shari Hulsman and Conrad Stenftenagel created many of the maps and diagrams. Their assistance was invaluable.

Lastly, I would like to thank my wife, Elain, for helping me complete this journey.

Preface

All northern and central Indiana is as flat as a board. Neat farms checker it, and the roads are straight as a ruler. Big barns and regular fences and waving fields of grain splash across the endless landscape. But some thirty miles south of Indianapolis the land begins to undulate, the hills are covered thick with forest, the roads wind, and the fields become patches on slopes. It is hill country because this is where the great glacier stopped and melted away and left its giant rubble piled.

Into this hill country of Indiana more than a hundred years ago came people from Virginia and Tennessee and Kentucky, pushing on into their new frontiers, though never out of the hills, for they were hill people. For a long time, they lived their own lives in the woods and the tobacco patches and the little settlements, asking nothing of any man and eventually they came to be known to the rest of Indiana as ‘quaint.’

—Home Country¹

Eighty years ago, the country was blessed with a writer of some note. Born and raised in the little town of Dana, Indiana, Ernie Pyle spent a good part of the 1930s traveling the country. Along the way, he found time to send a daily column to his newspaper. He was Charles Kuralt before there was a Charles Kuralt. In the two paragraphs above, I believe Pyle captures the unique history and nature of southern Indiana.

Eighty years after Pyle traveled the country, southern Indiana is still regarded as quaint. Until I-69 was constructed, southwestern Indiana was a bypassed backwater. Yet hidden deep in the Hoosier forests there lies a rare jewel—Patoka Lake. Its cool waters now quench the area’s thirst—a thirst that defined and shaped our ancestors. This is the story of the Patoka Lake Regional Water and Sewer District.

In 1976, I earned a civil engineering degree from Rose-Hulman and went to work at Midwestern Engineers in Loogootee—fresh out of school and green as a gourd. I grew up in Crawfordsville and often traveled through Paoli and English to visit family in Leavenworth. However, I knew absolutely nothing about Patoka Lake.

Jim Burch had hired me to take over his smaller clients and thus free him to devote more time to Patoka. On my first day, Jim introduced me to Ralph Seger with Dubois Water. Ralph, always the teacher, patiently guided this import from northern Indiana. I learned many lessons from Ralph. Over the forty years that followed, I was generally on the periphery of Patoka. I inspected the concrete pours on Phase I and designed the improvements Dubois would need to purchase more water from the district. I helped Dale Meyer with the structural design of Plant 2 and assisted Richard Burch in the design and selection of the ultraviolet advanced oxidation process—a first-of-its-kind system to remove taste and odor. One of my last chores was to help Richard design the most recent plant expansion.

I have always been fascinated by the District and how it has grown. Preparing this history has been a treat, and I trust you will enjoy reading the story as much as I have enjoyed writing it.

David L. Dahl

Introduction

In Indiana, the Patoka Lake Regional Water and Sewer District is without peer. It provides drinking water to thousands of residential, commercial, and agricultural customers, directly and indirectly providing water to thirty-three municipal and not-for-profit water utilities. These customers are scattered across eleven counties in southwestern Indiana, an area uniquely lacking readily available water.

Fifty years ago, America sent men to the moon and led the world in science and technology, yet in Crawford, Dubois, and Orange Counties, thousands relied on water supplies that were little changed from pioneer days—cisterns or shallow wells. Their wells were often poor in quality, high in sulfur, or otherwise contaminated. During droughts, the tanks ran dry, the wells failed, and water for drinking, cooking, and bathing had to be trucked in from springs or nearby towns. Although many of these small towns had dammed local creeks or constructed small lakes, they remained drought-plagued—streams dried up, and lake levels fell. For decades, local leaders struggled to quench their communities’ thirst.

In 1975, that all changed with the creation of the Patoka Lake Regional Water and Sewer District. Forty-four years later, a new generation of users has grown accustomed to a ready supply of clean water. All they need do is turn a faucet. Indeed, without the district, life for thousands of Hoosiers would be drastically different. How local leaders came together to solve this problem is a remarkable story—a story of a shared vision, cooperation, and perseverance.

To understand how far the district has come, we must remember where it started. This book is a part of that effort—an oral history of the men and women who developed the Patoka Lake. Interviews were conducted with thirty-five individuals, who discussed life in the area during the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. They reflected on how life changed with the coming of the district and on their roles in that change. Through their words, we discover how the district came into being and how the various communities put aside their differences to solve the water-supply problem.

The audio files and interview transcriptions have been donated to the Dubois County Museum. Readers interested in listening to those recordings may contact:

                                       Dubois County Museum

                                       2704 Newton St.

                                       Jasper, IN 47546

                                       [phone]

Those Kids Deserve Water Too: A History of the Patoka Lake Regional Water and Sewer District is the product of these oral histories and of a review of records, drawings, and documents maintained by the district, Midwestern Engineers, Inc., and by the Indiana 15 Regional Planning Commission.

Chapter 1

In the Beginning

Life in Midcentury

Fog-shrouded, the Patoka River wound lazily past Dubois. Here and there a tree towered above the mist, its leaves ablaze in the pink rays of dawn. Though still August, the trees were already changing. Under this canopy of maples and sycamores, the river barely trickled over the old mill dam; 1965 had been another dry year. The drought, which began in 1963, would linger through 1966. Ironically, in the midst of that drought, torrential rainfall turned the sleepy little Patoka River into a raging flood.²

The Indianapolis Star called it the worst flood since 1945.³ From Madison to Evansville, high water marooned motorists. By March 10, all roads in the Patoka Valley were closed.⁴ The town of Paoli was cut off. In French Lick, flood waters surrounded the Campbell piano factory. Fifteen employees were stranded. Floodwaters surrounded the town of Dubois—again. Floods often isolated the little town. In ’61, the state built a new highway bridge across the river. They boasted that the new road would never flood, but it did.⁵ Downstream, five blocks of Jasper were inundated. The State Board of Health reported that the flood had closed many sewage treatment plants. It was a mess again.

After flying over the area, Governor Matthew Welsh asserted that the damage in Dubois County exceeded the cost of the yet-to-be approved Patoka Reservoir.⁶ But that was a year ago; the flood waters disappeared as fast as they had appeared. Homes were cleaned and repaired, and normalcy returned, as did the drought. In Dubois, young Mary Lou peered into her cistern; it was nearly empty. She stepped outside and gazed into the sky—searching, hoping for a sign of rain—but there would be none today. She’d call the water hauler later.

We had a cistern, and somehow the contractor doubled the size of the cistern, so it was completely under our garage. And we had an opening on the garage floor, and when it rained, I was supposed to go out and turn the gutters so that it washed off the roof, so we didn’t get all the roof gunk, especially if it hadn’t rained for a while. So, I would turn the gutters and try to clean off the roof, and then all the water would run into the cistern—and that’s what we drank. When there was a shortage of rain, we also had water hauled.

⁷

—Mary Lou Schnell, former resident of Dubois, formerly a member of the Patoka Lake Regional Water and Sewer District Board.

Cisterns were routine. Just north of Dubois, Lorie Hubbs’s family had one.

We had a cistern, and I can remember when it would rain, and Dad would say, Go out, and we’d shut the gutters to a certain point where the water would run through the gutters to flush it out. Then we’d have to go out in the rain again and move them little levers over, and it would start filling into the cistern. And then there was a pump in the basement that it would pump in … if it got too dry, we had to have the water hauled in.

⁸

—Lorie Hubbs, general manager, Dubois Utilities

Of course, some homes had wells, but they were unreliable in dry weather.

Well, I lived in the country, but I went to school here, and at home, we had well water, you know, with a pump on it. I still remember the kitchen sink had a hand pump. And here in town, a lot of people had water hauled. There was a guy by the name of Albert Schroering that hauled a lot of water in this town … There was other people that hauled it, but I remember him. Albert Schroering done most of the water hauling around.

⁹

—Dan Kluesner, president, Dubois Utilities

In Dubois, Ralph Seger opened the feed mill. He worried that the drought would force more farmers to sell off their poultry and livestock. That would be bad for business and worse for the area. Raised in Dubois, Ralph joined the air corps out of Indiana University. After navigating B-17s, he returned home to teach business and physical education—and to coach. He left teaching in ’59 to work at Dubois Elevator and raise poultry on his farm. Providing the area with water would become his obsession.¹⁰

Down the road a bit, Dennis Heeke inspected his ponds—the source of water for his hogs and his birds. He swallowed hard; they were alarmingly low. Recently elected to the state legislature, Dennis had already been seeking a solution to the flooding and lack of water,¹¹ a concern sparked by his father, Ted. In the coming years, his efforts in the legislature would be crucial.

Farther south, Bill Hauser’s family had a pretty good well on their place near Schnellville, but they also had a large family.

The drinking water was out of a well that drained from the house. It was a well, and to be very honest, we had a large family. There were ten of us in the family. That well was always empty, especially in the summertime. Contrary to what we should have done, I suppose, my dad rigged up a system to take water from a farm pond and run it through a pipe that was inserted into the well. And he put a series of charcoal, sand, and some other fine rock in there, and then that water went into the well, settled in there, and we drank it. Our community there had similar types of ways of getting water.¹²

—Bill Hauser, St. Anthony Water Utilities, Inc.

Three miles north of Taswell, in Crawford County, Louie Allstott leaned against his truck. He was parked at a well-used spring. Many years earlier, Daniel Eastridge had piped it to better fill a tank in his truck. Louie had come in the wee hours to avoid the inevitable line. His three-hundred-gallon tank had been filling for a while, so he switched on a flashlight and took a peek. Yep, full enough, he thought. Driving home, he smiled. The line was already forming.

Yeah, I remember I even came in one night—Friday night—from work. I worked a second shift most of the time in Louisville, and the whole time I was working at International Harvester. And started hauling water when I got home that night, about 1:30, and hauled, I think, until the sun was up. Wasn’t nobody hauling then, so I had the spring to myself. During the day you might have to wait quite a while.¹³

—Louie Allstott, member of the Patoka Lake Regional Water and Sewer District Board

The Eastridge spring could fill a three-hundred-gallon tank in fifteen minutes. It was generally considered cleaner than other springs, so it was a favorite source.

On Sundays, almost a meeting place. And the rule was if any member of the Eastridge family pulled in, then they went to the front of the line because they owned it.¹⁴

—Jerry Allstott, water plant superintendent, Patoka Lake Regional Water and Sewer District

For Dan and his son Howard, hauling water from the Eastridge spring was a family business.

We had a cistern, and Dad hauled the water. He had a water-hauling business from the Eastridge spring. The spring was owned by my grandfather, Dan, but then it was deeded to each of the five kids.

Then after, we got rid of the water-hauling business. Then we had a little thousand-gallon tank that we’d put in the back of the truck, and we’d haul water in there to put in the cistern at home. And you put a little dab of bleach in it. And whenever you put a little dab bleach in it, they said, Well, that’s all good. …

But that’s really some of my oldest memories. Of course, there was always folks there getting water. And generally, whenever we’d pull in, they’d give us deference. But Dad would always say, Ah, go ahead and fill it out. I’m all right; I’m all right. Go ahead and fill it up or whatever.

But, yeah, I remember that there was a certain way, whenever you just had the pickup, that the water was running underneath you, that you’d just get out of the side, you’d sling that leg around. And you’d get in the back and go over, and you can get the hose and hook it up and put it in or whatever. And that way you didn’t have to get down in the water.

But I remember hauling many a load there, all hours of the day and night.¹⁵

—Mark Eastridge, son of Howard Eastridge

In the bottoms some people had wells, and some had cisterns. On the ridges, however, wells were rare.

We had a well. We lived up on a hill, and we had a well, and it’d go dry—what, twice a week in the summertime? I mean, we didn’t have water. Larry (Mark Eastridge’s brother) and I became almost like brothers because he would come at nine or ten o’clock at night and unload a load of water. Sometimes he would sit there—in the dry part of summer he would sit down for an hour and a half, or two hours to fill up that great big old tank. And then they’d come, of course, and run it in that well, and then Mom had to wait for two days for it to settle, and then bleach it a little bit so as you can even wash our clothes. That was our water; that’s what we had.¹⁶

—Darrell Newkirk, former resident of Crawford County

Similar activity occurred at other area springs. A popular one in Dubois County was the Bobby Hall spring near Cuzco. Water hauling was a big business, though pretty much unregulated. While some got their water from springs, others pumped it directly out of creeks or bought water from one of the towns that had water systems. Jasper pumped water out of the Patoka River, French Lick out of Lost River, and Paoli out of Lick Creek. English, Huntingburg, and Ferdinand had constructed small lakes, and Orleans had drilled wells.

While adequate most of the time, these town systems remained drought-prone. During the ’53 drought, flow in the Patoka grew so critically short that Jasper constructed an emergency pipeline from the White River. They hoped it would produce eight hundred thousand gallons per day to replace the depleted supply from the Patoka.¹⁷

None of these towns’ water mains extended far outside their corporate limits. Rural homes and farms continued to be on their own. Outside the White River bottoms, a lot of wells had been drilled into the fractured limestone bedrock. These were often high in dissolved solids or contaminated by surface runoff. Near Orangeville, north of French Lick, Jerry Reynolds’s family had such a well.

We had a well, A lot of sulfur. I never had a cavity, until I was thirty years old.¹⁸

—Jerry Reynolds, resident of rural Orleans and former owner of Reynolds, Inc.

John Noblitt lived near Orleans and also had a well. When his wife got sick, he was told to have the well tested.

So, I did. I sent it off to the state. It came back with big red marks across it, Do not drink this water. And we’d been drinking it for twenty years or something like that.¹⁹

—John Noblitt, resident of Orleans and former president of Patoka Lake Regional Water and Sewer District

Joe Gehl also owns property near Orleans. He lives near Lost River, which gets its name because it disappears north of Orleans. The water seeps into fissures and sinkholes until there is no flow above ground. Underground, the water flows southwest and emerges at the Orangeville rise, so the river becomes lost. Lost, that is, until a heavy rainstorm; then the fissures and sinkholes reach capacity, and the river flows along the surface in its dry bed. Joe’s well, which was near the dry bed, was affected by the river.

Oh yes. It could rain in Ohio, and two days later, our water would be muddy. And I mean muddy.²⁰

—Joe Gehl, project representative, Midwestern Engineers, Inc.

The water-supply problem was not limited to Dubois, Crawford, and Orange Counties. Water supply was difficult throughout southern Indiana. Up in Daviess County, Jim Burch grew up on a farm west of Loogootee.

At our house there, we had a dug well right by our house. I used to have to go down in it—because the clay would stop the water from percolating—and I had to go down in it and took that clay out of the top of it.²¹

—Jim Burch, resident of rural Daviess County, retired project engineer, Midwestern Engineers, Inc.

North of Loogootee, Doug Strange grew up in a home with no inside water.

When I was growing up, we actually had a pump outside. We had to go outside and pump water. … Hand pump, and we never had water on the inside until Perry Water system went through.²²

—Doug Strange, retired project representative, Midwestern Engineers, Inc.

Along the Lost River below French Lick is the Red Quarry area. It lies astraddle the Dubois-Martin county line north of Hillham. Mary Lou Schnell helped Dubois Water extend mains into the area.

The residents in this area had shallow wells or cisterns as their water source. One resident had a shallow well along a county rock road. He carried his water from there. Most residents had to have water hauled in weekly. I recall one resident who actually cried after being connected because she could do all her wash without the water turning dirty. We had water samples tested, and the results showed the water quality in 95 percent of the tests, was unfit for human use.²³

—Mary Lou Schnell

Down in Warrick County, Mike Phillips grew up in Tennyson. Nearly all of Warrick County had limited water availability.

Well, they just had individual wells. They didn’t have a water supply in Tennyson … I think that was developed in the latter part of the 1960s. It was a very new system when I returned here in 1969, but it was just well pumps. I can remember growing up in Tennyson as a kid; we had a pump that came up right into the kitchen. And we pumped our water right inside the house from a well for that pump, so that was a substantial benefit whenever we were able to get water there. … Some hauled water; some didn’t have a water well, so they’d have to haul it.

There was, much like a lot of small towns, there was a community water pump right at the main street there in town, where people could pump water if they had to carry it to their home, which they did for years. Lot of them did until they were able to get a public water system in place.²⁴

—Mike Phillips, attorney for Patoka Lake Regional Water and Sewer District and former Speaker of the Indiana House of Representatives

For rural Hoosiers in midcentury, water was indeed a precious commodity, and many relied on water supplies that had changed little over the previous one hundred years.

By the 1950s, however, pickups and tractors had replaced wagons. With the arrival of rural electrification in the 1940s, electric pumps replaced hand pumps. This progress made collecting water less labor-intensive. However, the sources themselves remained unchanged—shallow wells, cisterns, and springs.

In 1965, when Gus Grissom rocketed into space aboard the Molly Brown, he represented the apex of modern technology. Ironically, on that day, thousands of his fellow Hoosiers relied on the same water supplies that had been used by their great-grandfathers.²⁵

At midcentury, rural life was in flux, as it had been for decades. The state—indeed, the country—was in the midst of a rural-to-urban migration of unprecedented size. The number of farms, which had doubled in the last half of the 1800s, contracted by half in the 1900s. At the same time, farm size doubled. By 1950, most farm horses had been replaced by tractors. The Depression-era farmer—independent and mostly self-sufficient—was being replaced by the agri-businessman.²⁶ The postwar changes brought prosperity to some but forced others to give up. Crop productivity increased with modern farming methods and larger, more powerful farm equipment. Unfortunately, these improvements favored the flat, fertile prairies of northern and central Indiana. Farming the hilly, less-fertile ground, typical in southern Indiana, became unprofitable. Many fled for factory jobs in urban areas, some specialized in livestock or poultry, and many gave up.²⁷

So, farmers around there were sort of getting into the poultry business. This was probably back in the ’50s already. So, they dug ponds. They damned up ponds, and so the levels of those would really go down in the summertime. And so, they were sort of