Raymond Water Tower 1917

                                                                 Town Square 1929

City Water Comes to Raymond

Looking back at all the old photos of Raymond, that Mr. James Lewis was so kind to share, I found a photo of the old water tower, dated 1917.  The other photo is of the town square in 1929, where you can see the foot of the tower.  Today, the tower and the town square are still there, but thanks to our mayor, Ms. Isla Tullis, it is landscaped beautifully, and a pleasure to see on a summer’s day. 

Although I don’t know the exact date of when city water became available, I can definitely tell you that it was very long ago, based on the water pipes leading from the street to the underside of our house which was built in 1890.  I just about pitched a fit over getting a dishwasher, and Bill finally gave in an bought me one.  The day came where he was ready to put in a new sink (got that too!), and that’s when the plumbing nightmare began.  It started off with a snapped pipe, and went from bad to worse. At some point,  I realized that we were looking at a plumbing bill in the thousands.  So I got down in the mud and worked along side Bill as we dug and boy, did we dig. The pipes were in such bad shape, that the more we uncovered, the worse it got. As a last resort, I dug up the area (3 feet deep) around an outside faucet that was about 50 feet from the street, and lo and behold, there was another cut off value, hidden year ago, forgotten by many seasons.  And then, of course, it  started to rain.  Buckets of rain,  Filling all the holes we had dug. We stood there in the rain, rather stunned, and tried to fathom what had transpired. What were we going to do without water?

 But we were in luck.  After throwing ourselves around for a while, we realized we now had the ability to bypass the old pipes to the house and join the water connection under the house directly with the outside faucet. Bill went to the store and bought a 75 foot hose.  We hooked it up and once again we had water in the house.  However, I kept smelling this awful plastic smell in the water, and slowly but surely, the light went on upstairs and I remembered and realized that drinking from a hose is a dangerous thing to do since there is lead and another chemical I can’t pronounce. Bill went to the store again and bought hoses that were safe to drink from.  We ran the water for about an hour until all the traces of the garden hose smell were gone. Thank goodness for my sense of smell.  It may be a curse in most situations, but this time, it saved us.  I have absolutely no idea what we’re going to do about water lines in the near future, but I can tell you that I have never been so exhausted from an ordeal, except the time that I almost drowned, and the time that I had to ski up a 10,000 foot mountain in Colorado. But I now have a dishwasher.  Tonight we turned it on for its maiden voyage, and much to our relief, it went smoothly – no leaks!