The city of Greensburg is a city in the southwest part of Kansas.

It's pretty small, less than twice the size of New York Central Park, and it's 100 miles west

of Wichita.

In the late 1800s, Greensburg was a small town in a relatively new state that needed to establish

some building blocks.

But it had two problems. The first was

the city didn't have a reliable water source. Second, Greensburg had little to attract visitors.

It's dusty streets and wooden storefronts didn't really offer a compelling enough reason for

travelers to stop by. They really wanted to get Greensburg out there. They really wanted

to make a name for Greensburg. And they really wanted to attract people and businesses here.

To ultimately solve both problems, the town government chose to think big when it came to the well.

Enormous, in fact. Their big idea, a big well. And it was massive. I'm talking a well over 100 feet deep and more than 30 feet wide.

To put that in a perspective, it was large enough to hold the biggest animal on Earth, the blue whale.

Greensburg got its water and the attention that came with claiming to have the world's largest hand dug well.

We have people pull off all the time that stop into the well and they're just like,

what is this place?

My name is Baudelaire and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange,

incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, we visit Greensburg, Kansas, home to the nation's largest hand dug well to explore the remarkable story of a community's ingenuity and its extraordinary transformation into one of America's greenest cities.

More after this.

Thank you. More after this. How do you build the world's largest hand dug well?

You start by paying 50 cents a day to the first 30 men to show up for work.

...