Sulphur Water Temple , Sharon Springs, NY
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Interview Transcript: audio excerpts in italics

Speaker: Reuben R. Comrie

Background: Reuben Comrie worked as a plumber for many years. He was in charge of plumbing for the White Sulphur Company. In this segment he describes the spring which feeds the White Sulphur Water Temple.

Interviewer: Where does the water for the Imperial Bath House come from? Is there some sort of storage tank? If so, where is it located?
Comrie: The water is a spring which is right underneath the temple. The sulphur water comes there and that actually is a spring. I have pumped it out and visually seen what's down in there.

Interviewer: What's down in there?
Comrie: If you can picture a whole bunch of ledge rocks, there's a lot of it around there, ledge rocks, its just like somebody carved them, its like a big wall, and it's the same diameter, about 10 or 12 foot across and it goes down in there. I had a pump on there with a 20 foot of suction hose. It goes right down in there, I didn't measure it, but I had 20 feet of hose going down into it to pump it out.

And this ledge rock is just all around and it looks like somebody actually carved it, this beautiful job of carving, the good Lord, whatever the volcanic actions were, designed it perfectly, and that water comes out, it doesn't squirt out, it runs out between all these layers of rock and it's collected down inside there then it becomes pressurized in that sump and forces itself out through the center.

Mrs. Spofford, Homer Spofford's wife, had been somewhere and seen bubbling water and she came to me one day and she says, "Do you think you can do anything about -- on the sulphur spring, making it more active so that it will shoot up more?"

I designed a cone, a round cone, which set down in where the spring is, it was a round hole in there which was probably about 3 - 3 1/2 ft. around and I designed this cone, a concrete cone to sit down in there. In the bottom of it had a 2" hole for a 2" pipe and it pumped the spring down and set this cone down in there and sealed it all around the edge so the sulphur water was under pressure and it pushed itself up into the bottom of this and it swoosh, swoosh, it used to go and roll around in there, and the sulphur water went flying - and it worked and Mrs. Spofford, she was so happy, she said "Oh that's beautiful".

And that area all around the inside that cone would be contaminated with sulphur because of the water continually washing on to it. And it used to gurgle and made a lot of noise and the people would stand there and watch that water come up out of there and it flowed from there into a 4" overflow line to another concrete pit where all the pumps and that, pumped out of.

As time went by, kids….. kids, boys and girls threw stuff down in there trying to plug it up, and naturally, most of it, there was pressure there, so it was hard to get something that would go in there and drop down into that water which was continually pushing there to seal it off, you couldn't seal it off -- I mean you were dealing with a drill of ninety-six gallons a minute, it was quite a sizeable stream there.

It wasn't working, so, I again sat up there and pumped it out. They had to pull this cone up out and see if there was something stuck on to it because the water wasn't flowing up out of there the way it should. I pumped it out and along about that time Homer came by and the spring wasn't flowing. Well, that was his whole life, that was it! He had to have that water. And the water wasn't flowing out of there.

Well, this day when he didn't see that water there, he said "Oh my God" he said the business is all shot, I haven't any more sulphur water. So, he ventured down up to his house and told his wife about it, Roz, and they must have had some kind of calamity about it because they got, Mrs. Spofford came down and she was all upset. Homer said the spring isn't running. I said the spring is still running - its running down in there - its coming -- don't get all excited.

Well, they sat down in the parking lot in front of the spring for two hours I think, he said: How long will it be before it starts flowing? I said well, it flows 96 gallons a minute, that's over 500 gallons a hour, I said, its got to fill up all those cracks and crevices that this house is around, so its gonna take a little while. And, so they waited there and it was a little over an hour, approximately an hour and a half, and all at once the water came out of there. We had equipment in there, I told the workers to get the equipment out of there cause the water was coming.They were so delighted to see the water flowing, that was their life blood.

So I didn't find anything in the bubbler, I think that the water, the sulphur water actually formed a deposit in there and a large deposit of sulphur rock had formed down in the lower end of it there, it obstructed it, I cleaned it out and put it back in place and again the water started swooshing, rumbling, and gurgling.

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