Elderly William Jacob Bodenhamer must have been quite a sight more than a century ago hobbling across fields of Ontario and Upland, carrying “instruments of wire and gobs of metal alloys,” recalled his grandson Paul.

This was a man with a mission — he was “water witching,” which some believe is a magical way to use a particular “wand” of wood or metal to discover underground water. His business was buying and selling citrus orchards so he knew the need for adequate amounts of water.

Following service as a Union Army officer in the Civil War, Bodenhamer came to Pomona and finally Ontario in 1883. Here he had faith in his special talent for what is also called “water dowsing.”

Paul Bodenhamer in a 1972 letter posted on Ancestry.com said his grandfather got $100 for every successful water source he found in the Ontario and Upland area. He said he used a metallic wire device during his searches while traditional water witchers usually carry willow or peach wands.

His grandson eventually came to realize that being successful in water witching was mostly based on the user’s unquestioned faith in the wand’s magical properties.

“When I was 10 years old or so he taught me to use the instruments, and I got the same results he did,” recalled Paul Bodenhamer, “until I read in ‘Popular Mechanics’ that this was all hokum. Then it wouldn’t work any more.”

W.J. Bodenhamer — often called “Major” for his war service — spent the last 42 years of his life as a developer in the early years of Ontario and later Upland. Stricken with rheumatism from his war years, he had arrived there “with a pair of crutches and two dollars,” according to the 1906 edition of “American Biography and Genealogy.”

Once established, he was especially involved in developing the area west of Mountain Avenue of what would become the city of Upland. The area’s especially rocky soil wasn’t originally considered a prime growing area.

Bodenhamer was so confident in his water-witching talents he convinced company directors of the San Antonio Water Company to partner with him to dig wells at sites he found in the area. And water was indeed discovered, which he distributed through a system called the Bodenhamer tunnel.

However, what he found turned out to be insufficient to count on, at least according to an 1895 report by the water company. It was determined to be mostly runoff from the mountains a mile or two to the north, where San Antonio still collects much of its water supply today.

The disappointing report concluded that during wet years, “the well will flow in the spring and pump fairly well later, but in dry years, produces very little.”

Bodenhamer was also a big booster of the early growth of the area. He was a signer of the first petition for the proposed incorporation of Ontario. That 1887 effort failed, though cityhood succeeded four years later. He later signed the petition that led to Upland becoming a city, reported the Sun newspaper, March 14, 1906.

In his later years, he served as a San Antonio School Board trustee in Ontario while continuing to buy and sell orange, alfalfa, lemon and deciduous fruit acreage throughout the area.

Bodenhamer’s enthusiasm for the area’s potential was sometimes slowed because of his rheumatism as well as pain from bullet wounds received in Civil War battles in Missouri and Arkansas.

That war experience left him with some emotional scars as well as the physical ones. Growing up in Missouri — a state torn between sides of the Civil War — he had family members who served in the armies of the North or the South. He told his grandson his Union troops even captured one of his cousins who was later released in an exchange of prisoners.

Despite his prominence in Ontario and Upland, Bodenhamer was very forthright in admitting he had two brushes with the law. He had been arrested in Missouri for theft at a government job, but was later pardoned by the president, he claimed. A second arrest did put him in jail for several months. Later, those convictions played a role in a future court case in his new hometown.

Bodenhamer was selected as a member of the Grand Jury of San Bernardino County for 1893-94, which approved a somewhat politically motivated indictment of the current and former sheriffs, both accused of receiving illegal payments. In early 1894, the indictment was thrown out by a judge when Bodenhamer’s Missouri convictions were revealed, making him ineligible to be a grand juror, reported the San Bernardino Daily Times-Index, Jan. 25, 1894.

He and his wife, Maria, later attempted to build a house at Mountain Avenue and 21st Street in Upland, but “it was blown apart and scattered all over the valley” by a Santa Ana wind, recalled their granddaughter, Betty Lee Montgomery of Claremont. They successfully later built a second house, this time some distance away on the south side of 21st Street.

Major Bodenhamer died Aug. 19, 1926, at age 85 following years of illness. He is buried at Bellevue Cemetery in Ontario.

Joe Blackstock writes on Inland Empire history. He can be reached at joe.blackstock@gmail.com or on X, @JoeBlackstock. Check out some of our columns of the past at Inland Empire Stories on Facebook at www.facebook.com/IEHistory.