Most kids dream of a pool in the backyard. Micky Thornton never let the idea go. In a small Tennessee town, he started digging in his 30s, and the result is so big that hundreds of people have been baptized in it.
In short
- Micky Thornton, of Covington, Tennessee, had the idea when he was 9 or 10 years old.
- He started building the pool on Labor Day 1993, at age 39.
- By his estimate, it holds more than half a million gallons of water.
- It has hosted birthday parties, weddings, a national baseball team and more than 400 baptisms.
A childhood idea
“To start with, I probably had the idea when I was 9 or 10 years old,” Thornton told WREG-TV in Memphis, in a story shared by Tribune Media Wire in July 2017. When he moved to Covington, a small town north of Memphis, in 1992, he wanted a pool for his family.
He didn’t want an ordinary one. “I wanted large in the deep end but large and deep enough you could swim around it and not feel like you are trapped in a little box,” he said.
Digging on a pasture
Work began on Labor Day 1993. “I was 39 years old then,” Thornton recalled. His wife, Jane, asked that the pool not go right next to the house, so it was built on a sloping pasture.
The initial hole was more than 20 feet deep and lined with a polyethylene mat. The project used 320 yards of gunite and 40,000 pounds of steel rebar, FOX6 reported. Thornton even built his own filtration system, rather than buying a standard one. The pool features rock-lined waterfalls and sprayers.
A pool that kept growing
The project didn’t stop after the first summer. In 1998 and 1999, the Thorntons replaced the liner and added a waterfall and rock decoration. That version lasted about 15 years, and they updated the pool again in 2013.
A backyard open to the community
The pool soon became much more than a family project. It has hosted kids’ soccer teams, birthday parties, weddings and even the Japanese national baseball team: the family expected about 25 people and got around 50. “Of the different churches, there have been over 400 people baptized in the pool,” Thornton said.
At first, it was free for visitors. After many people offered to pay, the family set a suggested donation, and large groups could reserve through the family’s Facebook page. Big backyard projects can start small, like a simple rain barrel set up in the fall, and some lives are shaped by unusual places, like the family that lived for 40 years in the Siberian forest.
The limit
The story dates from 2017 and has been widely shared again since. The half-million-gallon figure is Thornton’s own estimate, and conditions for visiting the pool may have changed since then. Building a pool of this size also requires permits, engineering and safety measures that vary from one place to another.
That’s the story.
