The Rain Barrel Maker: Southern Cisterns
As a boy, Brandon Begnaud loved to hang out on the remains of two cisterns behind his great-grandmother’s house near Breaux Bridge. “I used to play on the round brick walls when I was a kid,” he says. “My grandmother told me they’d store their preserves in there because it was cool.”
Begnaud, who lives on property that has been in his family for four generations, built an Acadian-style raised cottage about ten years ago. He and his wife Amy have two sons and are expecting a girl this summer.
Perhaps the most noticeable structure on Begnaud’s property is the six-foot-tall cistern sitting atop a round brick wall right next to the front porch. A downspout attached to a gutter directs rainwater into the barrel. Begnaud often hooks a hose to a faucet at the base of the cistern and waters the begonias. “The pressure depends on how full it is,” he says. “It’s not impressive, but it flows out.”
A short stroll from the house is the workshop where Begnaud built the rain barrel.
In Louisiana, cisterns were traditionally built to catch and store rainwater. Like many other features of the built environment, they are rapidly disappearing.
“I wanted one for my house,” says Begnaud in his Cajun accent. “I tried to find a old one, but those are scarce. They have a lot of them in great condition, but people wanted to keep them as heirlooms.”
Since nobody was willing to part with an existing cistern, Begnaud, an electrician, decided to build his own. But first he had to figure out how. He talked to anyone he could find who remembered how cisterns were built.
“Some of the older people, they’d say, ‘Hey, go talk to this guy.’ They’d send you here, send you there.
“My daddy knew a man, Mr. Don, whose daddy used to build ’em. He told me what he remembered through a kid's eyes. He remembered going with his daddy to cut down cypress trees and mill ’em. They’d stack ’em and dry ’em out for six months to a year.
“He had some very old power tools his daddy bought about 1938—an electric planer and a table saw. Before that his daddy made ’em by hand with manual tools. He gave me a few hints about how to cut the floor. His daddy would cut it out with a skilsaw, a power handsaw. He’d tie it to a string in the middle and it would go around and make a perfect circle.”
Begnaud conducted his own oral-history project, picking up scraps of information. “Cisterns were originally used for drinking water,” he says. “I think they boiled it first. A lady told me that every so often when it was empty, they’d jump in there and pitch it with roof tar. Then they’d still drink the water.
“A man from Henderson, Mr. Darrell, would come over to my shop and talk to me. He told me when their cistern was empty his daddy and mama would put cotton bolls between the slats before a rain. With a drought, the boards would shrink. When they knew a rain was coming, they’d put cotton in the cracks to stop the water from coming out so the cistern would have a chance to swell.”
Begnaud visited local cisterns with a ladder so he could measure the circumferences. “I did that to get the symmetry of it,” he says. “Just to get the general shape of the taper so I wouldn’t overtaper it and make it look funny.
“I started kinda experimenting. I repaired a old one for my cousin. The bottom was rotten, so I replaced that and some of the slats. I repaired another one for a guy in Jeanerette. It showed me a lot. I was learning the shape of the boards, what to do with ’em, the tools, and stuff like that. I put all that information together and processed and analyzed it.”
Next he built a small cistern just to get the basics down. “I used pine two-by-fours,” he says. “I didn’t want to experiment with sinker cypress because it’s too expensive.” (Sinker cypress comes from trees that have fallen—or been felled—into water and stayed there long enough to become waterlogged.)
Finally Begnaud was ready to build a cistern from scratch.
“The one at my house is made of sinker cypress from Lake Dauterive near Loreauville. My cousin knew the guy selling the wood. It was waterlogged, just a week or two out of the water, and milled. I waited at least two or three months for it to dry, and I don’t think that was enough.
“I cut all the boards and shaped ’em into slats and let ’em dry some more. I planed ’em and let ’em dry some more. I liked building it; it was new and different, like a challenge. But in the beginning that was a nightmare. You got to take your time.”
With the cistern completed, Begnaud hired a local mason to build a four-foot-tall brick wall to support it. That was about ten years ago. Soon he had people knocking at his door, wanting cisterns.
At first he used sinker cypress, but that proved too time-consuming. “Sometimes I’d wait six or eight months for my wood. It was water logged. I’d put it in my shop with fans and dry it out for two or three months.”
Begnaud switched from sinker cypress to green cypress, which has ten percent moisture content compared to the 100 percent of sinker cypress.
“The first one I built for somebody else, I was nervous,” he says. “I was not too confident about the longevity. The old ones lasted sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety years.
“The second one I made was all right. The third one was aggravating because I realized it was a lot of work for the price. Whenever I’d get a leaky board, a board I didn’t shape right or a defective board, I’d have to break the whole thing apart and make some new boards and put it back together again.”
Begnaud keeps kiln-dried cypress boards stacked beneath his house. “I buy wood in bulk from a little town north of Washington in St. Landry Parish. The lumber mill sells it by the stack; that’s about twelve hundred to fifteen hundred linear feet, or board feet.”
Next to the stash, a giant split leaf philodendron thrusts chartreuse leaves into the air. “I have a lot of what I call dead-people plants,” says Begnaud. “This was from my daddy’s mother’s house in Lafayette. I think my daddy’s daddy planted it in 1956. When they sold the house two or three years ago, I went and cut a piece of this plant with a chainsaw. I have flowers my grandmother gave me, an amaryllis from my grandfather, irises from my aunt.”
He’s got enough lumber under his house to make two or three cisterns. “The last one I made, I probably pulled out fifteen or twenty boards to make it. The boards can be seven, eight, nine, or ten inches wide. I can get four slats out of every board. Typically I use about fifty or sixty slats per cistern. They are 1 3/8 inches thick.
“They just come cut with a band saw. Before you start you gotta straight-line ’em. Then you plane ’em. Then you rip ’em, cut ’em into slats. Angle ’em and taper ’em to give it that shape.”
Each cistern is six feet tall, but the floor is recessed so it holds five feet, eight inches of water. The slats are held in place by five or six galvanized-steel bands. Begnaud makes the lid from composite decking. An X-shaped brace supports the floor. “I took that idea from a old one my cousin had.”
Completed cisterns are tested for water tightness. “I swell ’em and waterlog ’em. To swell it, you fill it up with water. I used to use a pump from the canal behind my house, but now I use a hose. My kids love it because they can swim in there.”
Doing business as Southern Cisterns, Begnaud sells the barrels for $3,500 to $4,500 each. “I’m building three or four right now,” he says. “The smaller ones are five foot in diameter and the larger ones are six foot in diameter. A lot of people think they are pricey, but the material is sometimes $1,200 or $1,500 just for one. There’s nut and bolts. The base is all treated wood. All the little things added up.”
And then there’s the labor. “If I work at it nonstop, I spend between fifty and seventy hours. That’s working a full eight hours a day.
“But it gets easier every time. Every time I build one I get a little more efficient.”
Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net. DETAILS. DETAILS. DETAILS. Southern Cisterns (337) 278-5676 southerncisterns.com