On January 19, 1895, The Hartford Pioneer reported that two men had built a water reservoir and laid piping to the town’s new hotel and other buildings on Main Street, providing residents with access to a centralized water system.
“Paulsen & Dorn will have completed the water works by today, and it will be ready to supply the citizens of Hartford with pure water,” reads The Pioneer.
In addition to providing water to the buildings, Hartford featured a fountain, a watering trough and a ditch redirecting water from Prickly Pear Creek through town. On Feb. 9, W. E. Persell dug a 60-foot bedrock drift to hold a six-inch pipe to increase the town’s water supply.
Though water was abundant in the Hartford area — especially in the local mines — the town’s centralized water systems faced challenges such as the winter weather. While Tom Persell made efforts to thawthe exposed pipes, the cold weather quickly froze them again.
More than a century later, freezing temperatures are no longer a serious threat; modern engineering largely prevents that. Yet the task to distribute water to residents of the Hartford area remains daunting.
The Clancy Water and Sewer District was established in 2015 to address infrastructure issues regarding wastewater, a response to the proximity of private septic systems to wells. “The community does not have a central water or wastewater systems, and all 107 households are on individual wells and septic systems,” states the district’s website.
With the county, the District commissioned a Montana Tech survey in 2017 that found both nitrates and uranium levels in excess of Environmental Protection Agency safe drinking water standards: 18 percent of the wells sampled were above the standard for nitrates; 37 percent exceeded uranium standards.
That study set off what has become a long debate in Clancy about the desirability and viability of a centralized well that would provide consistently high-quality water to residents. The District began examining potential sites for test wells that would determine if the supply could support a larger centralized well system.
On April 26, the board announced that the district’s first test well, dug on Keith Foley’s land, had failed due to a low water yield, as previously reported in The Monitor. By June, the board had not determined the location of the next test well; however, Great West Engineering had identified two potential locations: one on land owned by Vicki Gruber and the other on the property of Steve Marks.
Collette Anderson of Great West Engineering said the Marks property is potentially the better choice because the Gruber property does not allow for 100 feet of isolation around the well without crossing over the property line and it is close in proximity to an old railroad remediation site. If the board chooses to build the test well on Gruber’s property, it would require additional approvals.
To supply Clancy residents with adequate water supply, the district needs two functioning wells and an elevated storage tank, Anderson said at the board’s June meeting. Both Marks and Foley said they were open to placing the tank on their properties.
The Clancy Water and Sewer board met again on July 26, after The Monitor’s deadline for press.
