He worked through the pages carefully.
Then he found an entry that made him stop.
It described an active spring supply at the upper margin of a field in the Cove Creek watershed. The spring was listed as approximately sixty feet above the barn. The conduit was made from American chestnut, with an estimated length of four hundred linear feet. The sections were joined by iron sleeves.
Glenn read the description again.
The elevation matched.
The material matched.
The joints matched.
The route matched.
Then he saw the installation date.
1887\.
He stared at the number.
The system had been installed 116 years before his tractor blade struck the buried log.
Beneath the description was the name of the family responsible.
E. Trivet and sons.
Glenn sat back.
Ezra Trivet.
His great-great-grandfather.
The man who had settled in the valley during the 1860s.
The man who had begun clearing the land that Glenn's family still farmed.
In 1887, Ezra and his sons had constructed approximately four hundred feet of wooden water conduit through the hillside. They had bored the logs by hand, fitted them together, and buried them along a route carefully chosen to carry spring water toward the barn and house.
The system had been built decades before rural electricity reached the property.
It had been built before tractors replaced much of the labor once performed by horses and people.
It had been built in a world where farmers relied on their understanding of the land because modern machinery was unavailable.
And now, more than a century later, parts of that system were still carrying water.
Glenn continued reading.
Another notation mentioned access plugs installed at intervals along the line for cleaning.
He copied the information, but at the time he did not fully appreciate its importance.
He was still trying to understand how such an elaborate system could have disappeared from the family's memory.
When he returned home, he began searching through old farm records.
Among the ledgers and papers left by his father and grandfather, he found an entry dated September 1951.
It recorded the installation of a half-horsepower electric pump at the springhouse intake.
Beneath the entry was a short note.
"Old log line no longer required."
Glenn stared at those words.
That was how the system had disappeared.
Not through some catastrophic failure.
Not because the spring had dried up.
Not because the buried timber had rotted away.
Electricity had arrived, and the family had installed a modern pump. The old wooden line had become unnecessary, so it was abandoned. Over the following decades, the people who remembered its construction and operation passed away. The access fittings disappeared beneath soil and grass. Later generations continued using the spring, but they no longer knew that a second water supply lay beneath the fields.
A system that had served the farm for sixty-four years had been reduced to a forgotten sentence in an account ledger.
Glenn closed the book.
Then he looked toward the barn.
The old auger was still hanging on the south wall.
He thought about it briefly, but the connection had not yet fully formed in his mind.
There was a more immediate question.