water-supply.]

Another report in this volume of the New York State Department of Health
illustrates very well how a spring or well may be contaminated, and is
taken from a report on an outbreak at Kerhonkson, Ulster County. The
report reads as follows: "The village of Kerhonkson is built mainly on
the side of a mountain of solid rock covered by a thin top soil of
variable depth. Owing to its rocky nature, only one or two wells exist
throughout the whole place; such a thing as a drilled well has never
been seriously considered.

"The inhabitants obtain their drinking water from a well on the property
adjacent to and above the present school building, and known as the
"Brown" well, and from a clear spring at the bottom of the hill in the
rear of the village store and known all over the region as the
Loundsbury spring.

"The school building is an old-fashioned two-story ramshackle affair
with overhanging eaves, especially designed to obstruct light and darken
the upper schoolroom. The building is in the center of a pine grove 250
x 150 feet in size, which also obstructs the light and tends to dampen
the building. At the extreme ends of this school lot are two privies for
the boys and girls, built on loose stone foundations, innocent of mortar
or cement, which allows the water in heavy storms to wash out the fecal
contents of from nearly a hundred pupils down upon the habitations
below. Were the wells existing in the village as carelessly constructed
as the Brown well and the various privy vaults which I have inspected,
the loss of life from typhoid fever would be terrible indeed.

"Obtaining the names of all the patients who had suffered from this
disease, I found that all but three were Kerhonkson public school
pupils, and all had drunk the water of the before-mentioned well on the
Brown property. Two out of these three cases were mothers of pupils who
had been stricken with the fever and who had nursed the children through
their long and exhausting illnesses and afterward had been attacked by
the disease themselves, while the third and remaining case was a
puzzler. This boy had never been a pupil of the school in question, nor
had he partaken of any of the water of the suspected well. He was a
pupil of another school entirely and lived in an adjoining village a
considerable distance away. A special visit to him, however, developed
the fact that some time before his illness he had come to the village
store in Kerhonk