They Laughed When I Inherited the Smallest Lot in Town — Until I Started Digging

The courthouse in Milford, Indiana, smelled like varnish and pipe smoke, and the particular silence that falls over a room right before people decide you are not worth taking seriously. It was a Monday in April of 1923, and I was 17 years old, sitting on a hard oak bench in the probate chamber of Judge Hollis Kern, wearing a gray suit coat that had belonged to a busboy at the Chicago hotel where I had washed dishes for the last two years and a pair of shoes I bought for a dollar fifty in the train station at Indianapolis that morning. I weighed 128 pounds. I had eaten a boiled egg and a slice of bread on the train, and I had come to Milford because a letter had reached me at the hotel, forwarded twice, telling me that my great uncle Wendell Ashcraft had died in February and had left me, being his only surviving blood relation, the following: one parcel of land in the town of Milford, Orange County, Indiana, dimensions 6 ft 8 in by 6 ft 8 in square, approximately 44 square feet.

The clerk read the description twice because he did not believe it the first time. “6 ft 8 in by 6 ft 8 in square?” That is the size of a door laid flat. That is the size of a kitchen table. That is, by any honest measure, the size of a grave with a little room to stand beside it. The county assessor, the clerk added, had valued the parcel at $3.

I remember the exact moment the laughter started because I was watching a beam of sunlight move across the floorboards when it happened. A man in a brown suit with a gold watch chain, who I would learn was named Mr. August Krell, proprietor of the Krell Bottling Works on Depot Street, let out a short, sharp bark of a laugh that he did not bother to cover. Then the man beside him, his foreman whose name I never learned, then Mrs. Ivers from the boarding house, who had come because Wendell owed her $7.40 for the last month of his life, then the whole room—seven or eight people who had come to see whether old Wendell Ashcraft had left anything worth taking—and who had just learned that he had left a plot of ground smaller than the rug in a parlor.

The lawyer, a thin young man named Mr. Leathers who had drawn the short straw of handling Wendell’s estate, cleared his throat and read the final clause of the will.

“The property shall pass to my grandnephew Silas Ashcraft, being the only person in this family who ever asked me a question about water and waited for the answer.”

More laughter. Mr. Krell leaned back and said, loud enough for the room: “44 square feet? That boy just inherited a hole in the ground. Old Wendell couldn’t sell that plot to a dog for a place to lie down. What are you going to do with it, son? Charge a nickel to stand on it?”

The foreman chuckled. Mr. Krell pressed his advantage. “I’ll give you $10 right now. $10 cash—more than three times what the county says it’s worth. You take it, buy a ticket back to wherever you came from, and you forget about this town.” He pulled a silver money clip from his pocket and laid it on the table between us with a theatrical slowness of a man who has done this before and expects to do it again.

“$10, son. That’s a week’s wages. That’s the best offer you’ll ever get on that piece of dirt.”

I looked at the lawyer. I looked at the paper on his desk. I looked at the little hand-drawn map that had been folded into the will, a sketch of a block in downtown Milford with Wendell’s parcel marked in red ink, a tiny square wedged between the rear wall of Krell’s Bottling Works on one side and the side wall of the Milford Feed and Seed on the other.

44 square feet of town, a splinter of ground between two buildings.

“I’d like to see it,” I said.

Mr. Krell laughed again, but there was an edge to it this time. “See what? Son, it’s a patch of weeds. There’s nothing there. You can see the whole thing from across the street without getting out of a wagon.”

“I’d like to see it.”

“I don’t know what he heard in my voice. I wasn’t being brave. I was being finished—finished with the laughter, finished with the room, finished with being the kind of person that adults felt comfortable laughing at. I had been laughed at in the county home in Vincennes, where I’d spent 11 years before they turned me out at 15. I had been laughed at by the cooks in the Chicago hotel who thought a small boy couldn’t lift a crate of dishes. I had been laughed at by a world that had decided before I was old enough to argue that I was not worth the trouble of keeping. The laughter in that courtroom was not new, but it was the last time I intended to sit still for it.”

Mr. Krell picked up his money clip slowly. His face had gone flat. “Suit yourself,” he said. “$10 today. $8 tomorrow. Nothing next week. You remember I made the offer.”

I need to tell you about Wendell before the rest of this makes sense. Wendell Ashcraft was my grandfather’s older brother by four years. My grandfather had gone to Chicago to work in the stockyards and died there of tuberculosis in 1908. Wendell had stayed in southern Indiana. He had been a well driller by trade for 40 years. He had drilled hundreds of wells across Orange, Lawrence, and Washington counties, and by every account of the men who hired him, he was the best. He did not just drill where the landowner pointed. He walked the property first.

He carried a forked hazel stick in one hand and a small brass depth gauge in the other, and the men who had watched him work said he would sometimes walk a 40-acre farm for three hours before he picked his spot. “That fool douses the town,” they said. “That fool talks to the ground.” But when Wendell told a farmer to drill at a certain spot and at a certain depth, the farmer hit water, and the water was clean.

That was the part the town did not want to talk about because Milford sat on top of a geological feature that nobody in 1923 wanted to think about too hard. The whole county was limestone and shale, and most of the wells in the region pulled water that was heavy with iron and sulfur. The water tasted of rotten eggs and rust. It stained laundry brown, ruined kettles. It was drinkable, technically, but nobody ever drank it willingly.

The town of Milford drank coffee and beer, and when they could afford it, bottled water shipped in from the mineral springs at French Lick, 22 miles to the west. And in a cabinet in the back of Krell’s Bottling Works, Mr. August Krell bottled water from the municipal well and sold it as Krell’s Crystal Springs Mineral Tonic to people in three counties who did not know any better.

Wendell had known. Wendell had known for 40 years, but Wendell was a well driller with a reputation for talking to the ground, and nobody listened to him about anything bigger than where to put a pump. Wendell had come to see me once I was eight, in the county home in Vincennes. He had written to him after my mother died to ask if he would take the boy.

He had come down on the interurban train on a hot Saturday in July, a small straight-backed man with white hair and hands that had been stained orange by iron water for so long that the stain had become part of the skin. He sat with me on the porch of the county home for two hours, and he did not ask me whether I was happy or whether I was eating enough.

He asked me if I had ever tasted water that was actually good. I said I didn’t know. He took a glass bottle out of his coat pocket. It was stoppered with a cork and sealed with wax. He broke the seal with his thumbnail and poured a little water into a tin cup he had also brought with him. And he handed me the cup. “Drink slow,” he said.

I drank. The water was cold. It had come up from his own well that morning. He told me later. And he had sealed it in the bottle to keep the cold. It tasted like nothing I had ever tasted. It was sweet. It was faintly metallic. But not the foul way the home’s water was metallic. It was mineral. The way a good stone is mineral. It tasted of depth and patience. And something almost like iron. But not iron. I drank the whole cup. And I asked for more.

He looked at me. The way an adult sometimes looks at a child who has said something the adult did not expect. Not with pity. Not with obligation. With the specific, unhurried attention of a man who has found someone worth talking to.

“Most people,” he said, “have never drunk real water in their life. They think what comes out of their pump is the way water is supposed to taste. They don’t know that the ground under their feet has better water than they will ever buy in a store. But you have to know where to look. And you have to be willing to go deep.” He paused. He tapped the empty cup with one stained finger. “That’s what I do. That’s what nobody in Milford understands. Everybody drills to 50 ft because that’s where the easy water is. Nobody goes to 260. Nobody goes through the shale to the deep aquifer. We’re not aware of it. That’s why I’ll come here. To drill.”