September 15, 1963. A Mysterious Well. And Dioramas of Death.

Headline this weekend after Charlie Kirk's assassination:

"America Enters a New Age of Political Violence!"

No. You can call it sad, tragic, traumatic, etc., but not new. I'm writing this on September 15, 2025, and 62 years ago on September 15, 1963, at 10:22 on Sunday, a bomb ripped through the all black 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing 4 young girls and wounding anywhere from 14-22 people as they were getting ready for Sunday Service. According to one survivor, the explosion shook the entire building and propelled the girls' bodies through the air "like rag dolls".

Four white men, Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, Herman Cash, and Bobby Frank Cherry, from the Cahaba River Group, which had splintered off from another Ku Klux Klan group because they thought the KKK was too restrained, not violent enough, in the fight against integration, were the bombers. It being Alabama in the 1960s, the original FBI investigation ended without indictments, and it wasn't until 2001, after President Clinton appointed Doug Jones as the US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, that ALL the bombers (except Cash who had died of old age) were finally indicted, tried, and convicted.

Addie Mae Collins (age 14, born April 18, 1949),

Carol Denise McNair (age 11, born November 17, 1951),

Carole Rosamond Robertson (age 14, born April 24, 1949), and

Cynthia Dionne Wesley (age 14, born April 30, 1949)

And then came November 22, 1964 – the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, and in 1965 they started televising the Vietnam War… and we all sat, eating our dinners and watching the war every single freaking night - including the little girl running naked and screaming because she'd been covered in napalm, the MyLai massacre, the Vietcong man being shot in the head, his brains blowing out, and then dropping dead on his side - until it ended in the early 1970s when we got to watch everyone in South Vietnam trying to get on the helicopters as they left. And August 1, 1966, when Marine veteran Charles Whitman went up the Main Building Tower at the University of Texas, onto the observation deck, and started shooting people down below. In the next hour and a half he killed 15 people (one a pregnant woman), and injured 31 others before he was finally shot and killed by 2 Austin police officers. And in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were both assassinated, followed by the bloody 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

And it's never stopped. I am sick to death of endless violence, pundits, politicians, splinter groups, condolences, sorrows, and horrors.

I have decided that the real problem is that we humans don't like humans very much.

But enough of that.

Let's talk instead about the little mysteries of life.

I've been having some work done on our yard, including ripping out five large - 2' x 4' - uneven flagstones in the back that were simply a health hazard to me and my husband as we potter around living our Beatrix Potter lives with the bunnies, the ever chattering squirrels, the sparrows, and the cawing crows. Especially in winter when the flagstones were slick with ice and/or snow.

Anyway, my guy (everyone needs a "my guy") came and was working away. One flagstone, two flagstone, three flagstone, four flagstone - and he was at the door saying, "You've got to come see this!"

So I came out, and this is what I saw:

That's a well, with carefully built brick walls, and some kind of concrete thingy in the middle. Now, our house was built in 1919, and there was no sign of a well on the survey map that came with the house when we bought it. We never dreamed there was a well under that flagstone, and I will say to its credit that we, and probably a lot of folks, have walked across that flagstone many a time and it never shifted an inch.

But my curiosity was aroused (most odd things arouse my curiosity, and since life has a tendency to be full of them, I spend most of my life curious and investigating), so this week I've been calling around, trying to find out:

1. how far the city limits were in 1920 (in 1880, the east-west city limit of Sioux Falls was 14th street, which is REALLY small);
2. was there running water out this way in 1920? (there was a private water company which set up shop in the 1890s but then closed down, and the city took over some time in the very early 1900s)
3. where was the outhouse?

I've talked to a lot of people at the City this morning, and basically, everyone had a well throughout the 1800s, and into much of the 1900s. And by much of the 1900s, I mean that as late as the 1970s, when with a population of 72,000, the city decided to put in another reservoir up in North Sioux Falls somewhere. That would cost money, so there was a referendum, and a number of people in the neighborhood voted against it. The reason? Because if they got a reservoir, then the neighborhood would have to get indoor plumbing. Strangest hill to die on I've ever heard of.

I was also assured that probably the outhouse area has long disappeared, being filled in, and then... decades passing. Which is a shame in some ways, because it might have been interesting to excavate that. People used to throw all kinds of trash in the outhouse because where better?

And I'm still debating whether to get the well cleaned up and pumping again... But then we'd have to lift off that damn flagstone again. Decisions, decisions.

***

Meanwhile, who here has heard of Frances Glesner Lee (1878-1962)? She was a Chicago heiress to the International Harvester fortune, who wanted to go into medicine, but was told ladies didn't do that. So she hand crafted (including knitting and sewing the various fabrics, making miniature cigarette butts, etc.) "the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, composite crime scene models recreated on a one-inch-to-one-foot scale. These macabre dioramas were purpose-built to be used as police training tools to help crime scene investigators learn the art and science of detailed forensics-based detection." Miss Marple would have LOVED her.

"Red Bedroom"

Go here (LINK) and (HERE) to learn more about her and see more of the dioramas. Or watch the video below:

I wonder if any of them show a murder in or near a well? BTW, our well had no bad smells coming up, just cool earthy air.