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Many parts of Canada endured severe drought through the summer and early autumn of 2025, straining groundwater supplies. Wells ran dry from the Maritimes to eastern Ontario, and even within the city limits of the national capital, some residents have resorted to costly water delivery as their decades-old wells have failed.
Climate change is undoubtedly to blame for the intensity of recent droughts, but many rural Canadians have a long experience of groundwater precarity. While curating a 2019 exhibition on water for the City of Ottawa Museums, I delved into an untold history of well location and construction techniques in the Ottawa Valley. This research illustrates settlers’ creative adaptation to the region’s unusual hydrogeology and hints at the challenges in adapting to even more unpredictable groundwater conditions in an age of extreme weather.1
The eventful geological history of the Ottawa Valley region has shaped its groundwater conditions. With the retreat of ice age glaciers, the Ottawa and St Lawrence valleys became a cold and brackish arm of the Atlantic Ocean that scientists today call the Champlain Sea. When the sea also retreated about 10,000 years ago, it left a variety of materials, from sandbars marking the ancient course of an enlarged Ottawa River to thick, unstable deposits of marine “leda clay”. These lie atop or alongside earlier overburden, such as glacial till, and diverse bedrock formations.
“When European settlers arrived in the region in the nineteenth century, they found the groundwater perplexing.”
Each of these materials and formations holds water in varying quantities and of varying quality. When European settlers arrived in the region in the nineteenth century, they found the groundwater perplexing. The water in one well might be too salty or too sulphurous; on a neighbouring farm, the well might not produce enough water, particularly during droughts.
To find suitable wells, many settlers resorted to dowsers, or “water witches,” people with a gift for finding underground water sources using only a forked stick and their own intuition. Settlers have practiced dowsing in the Ottawa watershed since at least the 1860s, when a sceptical correspondent of Toronto’s Canada Farmer newspaper became an enthusiastic believer after watching a water witch locate “an underground rill” in Roxborough Township.
![The first few lines of a nineteenth-century newspaper clipping. The headline reads “The Divining Rod, for finding out Suitable Places for Digging Wells.” The text reads, “To the Editor of The Canada Farmer: SIR, - You will perhaps be surprised at being asked for your opinion respective the supposed virtue of a small hazel fork revolving in the hands of seemingly gifted persons, over certain places only; as in the following case, which lately came under my notice. A young farmer residing in the neighbouring township of Roxborough, being about to dig a well, was at a loss to select a suitable place, as several not very…”]](https://i0.wp.com/niche-canada.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Fig-1-Canada-Farmer.jpg?resize=460%2C290&ssl=1)
A colonial folk-cultural import, dowsing has no scientific basis. Yet it has proved remarkably persistent. In a classic 1959 study, American scholars Evon Voght and Ray Hayman surveyed five hundred county agricultural extension agents about regional dowsing practices. The responses suggested that dowsing is best understood as a ritual response to groundwater uncertainty: it is rarely practiced in regions where groundwater conditions are well known, either from practical experience or scientific study, and thrives instead in regions where groundwater is mysterious.2
The Ottawa Valley fits this pattern, and despite its scientific shortcomings, dowsing undoubtedly contributed to a folk knowledge of local aquifers. A dowser who practiced in a particular place over many years would learn, through trial and error, about the water table and water quality in his or her community. Dowsers thus became keepers of local ecological knowledge before scientific aquifer mapping.
Dowsing was not the only way in which settlers came to understand local groundwater. They also adapted tools for well construction. In the mid-nineteenth century, digging wells with picks and shovels gradually gave way to boring wells using a well auger. Powered by hand, horses, or steam- or gasoline engines, these augers could sink wells as deep as 100 feet, about ten times deeper than hand digging, and tap into cleaner, more reliable aquifers. The United States Patent Office issued over 150 patents for well augers between the American Civil War and the First World War, many of them adaptations to various soil conditions.
Canadian entrepreneurs brought American well augers north of the border, and in western Canada provincial and territorial governments owned and operated augers as a public service for new settlers. Canadian inventors also designed their own augers, sometimes tweaking existing designs to bore more effectively in local overburden. George Burroughs of Fallowfield, Ontario, patented one such design in 1890, adapting a popular American model to bore more efficiently through leda clay.
![Black and white drawings of a well auger, consisting of a hollow cylinder with spiralled blades at its base.]](https://i0.wp.com/niche-canada.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Fig-3-Burroughs-Patent.gif?resize=791%2C1024&ssl=1)
Two years before Burroughs’ invention, Joseph Garand, a carriagemaker in Coteau-Station, Quebec, patented his own auger design, which abandoned the usual “bucket” or “pod” design to reduce suction when boring through clay. Garand never commercialized his auger, but his patent may have inspired an auger preserved in the City of Ottawa Museums collection. Constructed before the First World War by Ernest Brereton, a blacksmith in Navan, Ontario, this auger bored its last well in 1973. Ernest’s son, Hamilton “Ham” Brereton, was also a dowser, so he could both locate and construct wells.
Left: Patent Illustration for Garand’s Improved Earth Auger, 1888. (Canadian Intellectual Property Office, Patent 29738. Right: The Brereton Well Auger mounted for exhibition at Pinhey’s Point Historic Site, Ottawa, 2019. (Author photo)
Ham Brereton’s son-in-law, Barry Irvine, recalls that turning the hand-driven auger was back-breaking and it took three days to bore a well forty-five feet deep. Although labour-intensive to construct, relatively shallow bored wells remained popular in the Ottawa Valley long after the technology became obsolete elsewhere. A 1968 Environment Canada groundwater survey of Russell County identified eleven bored wells still in Navan – about 20% of the wells in the Breretons’ home village. In other eastern Ontario villages, as many as half of households relied on bored wells.3
Auger-bored wells typically yielded more water and were less prone to surface contamination than dug wells; regional hydrogeology also made them preferable to deeper, drilled wells. Ham Brereton alleged that unscrupulous well drillers, who charged by depth, would drill deep into the bedrock even if this yielded sulphurous water. Moreover, the pipes used to case drilled wells prevented infiltration except from the lowest stratum, but the traditional interlocking tiles used to case bored wells allowed water to enter the well from different strata, increasing reliability. In the village (now Ottawa suburban community) of Orléans, bored wells accounted for forty-five of 129 wells (35%) surveyed by federal government geologist E.B. Owen in 1953. Linking Owen’s list to Ontario government well registrations, I have determined that only fourteen of these forty-five bored wells were replaced with drilled wells during the 1950s and 1960s, while drilled wells replaced over half of the community’s dug wells over the same period. It seems that the quality and quantity of water from bored wells was satisfactory for many residents.4
Rapidly suburbanizing Orléans got a municipal water system in the late 1960s, but in rural areas of the Ottawa Valley, residents still rely on relatively shallow dug- or bored wells, as they do in other regions of the country. These wells’ location and construction are evidence of settlers’ gradual acquisition of local ecological knowledge and their adaptation to local hydrogeological conditions: the diversity of overburden, the unpredictability of local aquifers, and the sulphurous water that permeated some bedrock formations.
“Appreciating past adaptations to groundwater precarity as a process of building connection to place may encourage a spirit of continued adaptation and resilience.”
As rapid, anthropogenic climate change brings more and more extreme weather events, including droughts, groundwater conditions will fluctuate and some of the adaptations of yesteryear will no longer suffice. As the CBC reported this summer, some rural Canadians are already abandoning centuries-old dug wells in favour of deeper – and costly – drilled wells. Those who choose to do so have access to more hydrogeological data than their predecessors, who relied on folk practices such as dowsing and on trial and error to make sense of the world beneath their feet. Nevertheless, appreciating past adaptations to groundwater precarity as a process of building connection to place may encourage a spirit of continued adaptation and resilience.
Feature Image: Detail of a surficial geology map of Russell County. View the full map here.
Notes
1 For a longer version of my research on this subject, see Forrest Pass, “Material Evidence of Folk Hydrology in Rural Canada: The Well Auger and Dowsing Rods of Hamilton ‘Ham’ Brereton,” Water History 13 (2021), 265-291. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12685-021-00289-1.
2 Evon Voght and Ray Hayman, Water Witching U.S.A. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).
3 J.E. Charron, A Study of Groundwater Flow in Russell County, Ontario (Ottawa: Environment Canada, 1974).
4 E.B. Owen, Ground-Water Resources of Gloucester Township, Carleton County, Ontario (Ottawa: Geological Survey of Canada, 1953).
Forrest Pass