A Miraculous Rescue at the Well
A two-month-old infant survives a twenty-one-foot fall into a Clarke County well in a harrowing ordeal.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A two-month-old child of Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Sturgess narrowly escaped drowning in the family well at their home in Clarke County last Saturday. While playing around it, the child fell in and went down twenty-one feet into ten feet of water. The mother succeeded in getting the well rope down and at the child, and thus prevented it from drowning, though unable to get the child out. A man was called, who slid down the well rope and stood up to his neck in water while he fastened the child so that the mother could raise it. Another man finally came and drew the man out of the well. The little one was not hurt. The well has since been made secure against a recurrence of this accident.
“The mother succeeded in getting the well rope down and at the child, and thus prevented it from drowning, though unable to get the child out.”
This 1885 account of a child falling into a dangerously open well serves as a stark reminder of the perils of frontier domestic life, long before modern safety regulations. Today, such 'everyday' dangers in Seattle have shifted from open wells to issues of urban safety and housing standards, yet the community-wide effort to save the child remains a timeless example of bystander intervention.
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