Photo of an Artesian well in Taal [July 1914, BPW Quarterly Bulletin]

This photograph is part of a series showing mostly construction projects undertaken by the Bureau of Public Works during the American colonial era. All photographs have been digitally extracted from the Quarterly Bulletins of the bureau and processed using graphics editing software to improve quality. It goes without saying that the eventual output of each extract was always going to be dependent on the quality of the original scan.

In 1914, the Bureau of Public Works was kept busy keeping up with an assortment of infrastructure projects of the American colonial government designed to improve the standard of living, movement to, from and within Batangas and stimulate economic activity.

Among these projects, made particularly imperative by a cholera outbreak the previous decade, was the drilling of artesian wells around the province. One such well was at Kilometer 133 along the Batangas-Nasugbu Road. Cross-referenced against a road system map of the bureau, this artesian well should be between the municipalities of Alitagtag and Taal but closer to the latter. It may be in what is now Santa Teresita, which was in 1914 still part of Taal.

A photo of this artesian well is shown below. That the need for potable water was great is evident from the small crowd gathered around it, each person waiting for his or her turn to collect water.

An artesian well in or near Taal.  Image digitally extracted from the July 1914 edition of the Bureau of Public Works Quarterly Bulletin.

Notes and references:
¹ “Bureau of Public Works Quarterly Bulletin, Volume 2 No. 4,” compiiled by C.A. Tansill, published July 1914 in Manila by the Bureau of Public Works.