My posts sometimes serve as distress flares I fire off to social media when I’m looking for more information about a topic. I recently shared one about two flowing wells near Yorktown, hoping someone would pipe up and tell me about one I’d heard existed near West Muncie and Gas Lake. Last week, someone did, even inviting me to come out and it in her backyard. Mission accomplished!
I’ve been intrigued by flowing wells ever since I encountered my first twelve or thirteen years ago. I set out to find all of them I could after I learned that Muncie newspaperman Dick Greene had been to eight in Delaware County in the 1940s. I’ve now been to twelve across the county, and the Skillen-Gooden Well, as I’ve decided to call this most recent one, was my twenty-fifth across East-Central Indiana.
The land it sits on has an intriguing story, and it’s easiest to explore the history of this flowing well by traveling backward. Judy Allen and her husband bought the property on West Mill Road in Yorktown last year from someone who purchased the parcel from the Boyle family. The Boyles -Dortha and her father Clyde- owned the land the well sits on from 19431 to 20152.
Clyde obtained the tract from Daniel F. Cox, who acquired it from the D.O. Skillen of the Skillen-Gooden Glass Company in 19193. The plot was weedy and overgrown by then, but Cox transformed it into a park featuring smooth lawns, flower beds, a lagoon, and the flowing well in the 1920s. Prior to the improvements, the well was already known as a popular place to stop to fill jugs with mineral water4.
A manufacturer of bottles, flasks, and fruit jars, Skillen-Gooden (sometimes called Skillen-Goodin) was founded in 18975 after the promise of natural gas near Yorktown became too big to pass up6. The company drilled a gas well on its property in 19017, and I bet that’s what became the flowing well we see today. Judy found another one, capped, after I went to the well that was actually flowing.
It doesn’t always happen, but water spews from some old gas wells because they were driven through aquifers where the pressure is high enough to force the water to the surface. Over time, well casings drilled in valleys where the water table is confined between impermeable strata began to degrade, and water came through the cracks to flow upwards. East-Central Indiana was once home to countless gas wells, but only a tiny percentage were drilled under the right topographical conditions to turn into the artesian wells we find scattered around today.
Before Skillen-Gooden came into the picture, the land the well sits on was owned by a mill operator named Jesse H. Williamson. A veteran of the Civil War who served with the Eighth Indiana infantry, Williamson was also a charter member of Yorktown’s IOOF lodge and a member of the Grand Army of the Republic’s Williams post8. Despite his status as a prominent citizen, Williamson was not that successful at keeping a mill running: his properties were destroyed at least three times before he gave up for good in the 1890s9.
Despite his losses, Williamson was persistent, a characteristic he shared with most artesian wells that flow and flow. Unfortunately, the well that was later drilled on his land is finicky- water was gushing out of its base when Judy Allen first messaged me but had stopped when I came to take photos two hours later. That’s atypical, and I think its fussy flow has to do with an attempt at capping the well that filled most of the casing with cement. A right-angled pipe directs what water does come out into underground plumbing that leads to Buck Creek, but it’s easy to see where people might have filled buckets from the top of the pipe in years past.
Although the well sits on private property and is invisible from West Mill Road in Yorktown, Judy was kind enough to let me publish its location here in the map above. The Skillen-Gooden well marked the fourth I’ve been to in Mount Pleasant Township, and I hope to soon make it to a fifth I know exists on High Banks Road. I’ve heard about two more in the Beverly Heights and Pleasant Hills neighborhoods and have driven past where I think they are, but I haven’t been able to find them.
I started this post by mentioning that some of my blog entries serve as distress flares I pop off when I’m seeking more information about something. This is another one! If you’re a local who knows the precise whereabouts of the Beverly Heights and Pleasant Hills flowing wells near Yorktown, I’d love to hear from you. Until then, I’ll keep an eye out for more- I won’t stop until I find them all!
Sources Cited
1 Delaware County, Indiana. (1943, February 6). Deed Book 277. p. 135.
2 Dortha E. Boyle, 89 (2015, March 29). The Muncie Star Press. p. A9.
3 Delaware County, Indiana. (1919, May 24). Deed Book 170. p. 427.
4 Swampland Developed Into Park (1929, July 25). Muncie Evening Press. p. 2.
5 Skillen-Goodin Glass Co. (1906, August 27). The Muncie Press. p. 23.
6 Greene, D. (1979, March 29). Seen and Heard in Our Neighborhood. The Muncie Star. p. 4.
7 In And About The Gas Belt (1901, February 9). The Muncie Morning Star. p. 7.
8 Death Claims Businessman (1916, April 4). The Muncie Press. p. 3.
9 Card to the Public (1888, January 21). The Muncie Daily Times. p. 1.
