Just What is a Cistern Anyway?

In 1997, I had the privilege of traveling to the countries of Jordan and Israel. I was asked to make a video about the historical significance of scores of sites in that region. Part of that documentary tells the story of the ancient mountain fortress just east of the southern end of the Dead Sea called Masada.

In this otherwise dessert region, it was the many cavernous cisterns built in the northwest side of the cliff that held the secret of why the fortress was virtually (and secretly) self-sufficient during one of the most heart-breaking sieges in history. It was also in one of these then water-filled cisterns that two Jewish mothers (and 3 children) hid during the siege and lived to tell what happened there.

We don’t use the word “cistern” much anymore, but it is a holding reservoir for water--large or small. In fact, each of our homes probably has at least one or two cisterns in daily use. I’m referring to that modern marvel, the cistern toilet. There was a time when the cistern (now called "the tank") was mounted high on the wall to create more water pressure for the flush.

Some cisterns have no pressure at all. On the way to Masada back in 1997, we stopped at some public restrooms that had open cisterns for "flushing." You’ll notice in the picture there is no stool, just a porcelain hole in the ground with molded “foot prints” to tell you where to put your feet. These "facilities"are common in the Middle and Far East (We also encountered them in Northern Thailand.) When you’re ready to flush, you scoop the water from the cistern and--vwella--you can “flush” as often as you like. (No need to wait for the tank to refill.)

Okay. That was perhaps too much information. The remainder of the post will focus on the less personal uses of cisterns.

Cistern beside Farm House

In the previous post, Professor Harold Hill, warned listeners that the presence of a pool hall in their town would leave "parents caught with a cistern empty on a Saturday night." Farm houses often had underground cement cisterns beside the house that gathered rain water from the house gutter system.

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Sometimes cisterns were connected to the farm well and water had to be pumped by hand to fill the closer source. Sometimes they were elevated beside the house like a small version of the wooden water towers from the same time period. (Seen in photo at right.) Elevated cisterns were "pumped" full to provide "water pressure" to all plumbing in the house.

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These elevated wooden cisterns were, of course, the precursor to the various styles of steel "water towers" that sprang up across America through the 20th Century.

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They come in all shapes and sizes. The larger designs commonly hold a million gallons of clean fresh water supplied to thousands of homes within several square miles.

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Not all city water towers look like the ones we see most often. A few blocks from where my daughter goes to college (and just down the street from her favorite chocolate shop) is the famous Chicago Water Tower built in 1869. This giant "Sand Castle" is said to be the only building to survive the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. It's an ornate cistern that still serves its original purpose 140 years later.

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In preparing this post, I learned that my father's desire to dig a "cistern well" was actually both an old concept and a new, very "green" idea three decades ahead of its time. It was a 35 feet deep well and 6,000+ gallon cistern all in one, but it was nothing like the cisterns in the following videos

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Here is a link to a brief video about modern above-ground galvanized cisterns. And the screen below is a report about somewhat smaller cisterns similar to what used to be called "rain barrels."

If you found that informative, and have a little more time, here is a much bigger version of the same concept for the truly "green" home of the 21st Century.

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There is nothing new under the sun. Man's need for convenient, clean water is a sub-plot of recorded time. Today most of us take this luxury for granted, but depending on where you wish to build a house, it becomes one of the first problems to solve. In our case, back in 1970, the land we owned did not have access to city water, and my dad equated an ample water supply with the self-sufficiency behind his desire to move to the country in the first place.

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The next chapter is about digging wells in general, but the chapter after that is the long-awaited story of Dad's unique idea (that I have not seen anywhere else in all my research). It was an idea that Dad thought would take us four or five weeks, but as usual he misjudged the downright toil involved, and the project took nearly twice that long, taking every Saturday of that summer, from May through August . Ah, what memories!