Aside from occasional digging or a ride in a golf cart, my trips to flowing wells are usually pretty sedate. I roll up, hop out, take a picture, and, usually, take a swig! That said, it was a different experience tracking down two wells just east of Perkinsville in western Madison County last week: the trek involved traversing abandoned roads, blazing a path through the forest, and wrangling a Gator down a fifty-foot slope to the White River’s banks.
My sherpa on the trip to the wells near Perkinsville was Fred Schrope. He started reading this blog a couple months ago and has provided invaluable context and information to add to my research. He signed off his initial message by advising that he’d soon write back about “a flowing gas well I’m familiar with that you don’t know about.”
That’s how I learned about the Garretson well.
The Garretson well
What Fred and I wound up calling the Garretson well was drilled by the Consumers Gas Trust Company sometime before 18901 when it sat on Dr. William Garretson’s 101-acre plot in rural Jackson Township2. Garretson was born in Perkinsville in 1860, attended one-room schools nearby, and graduated from the Medical College of Indiana in Indianapolis3. Although Dr. Garretson practiced in Perkinsville, he eventually came to own and manage 400 acres of farmland4. In 1916, Garrison’s daughter, Nelle, married Willis Simmermon5.
Fred knew about the well because he helped farm the adjacent land owned by Bill Simmermon, Willis and Nelle’s son, from 1965 to 1969. In those days, the Garretsons’ abandoned farmhouse, barn, and silo still stood near the end of what Google calls County Road 775-West. Although it’s little more than a gravel farm lane today, the old road used to ford the White River northeast of Eighth Street, where it connected with County Road 800-West and an extension of West County Road 280-North towards Perkinsville6.
Today, the land is owned by John Simmermon of Simmermon Farms and the Likens family. The journey to the well took Fred and me three-quarters of a mile down Old 775 before it ended and we had to park the car. We walked another tenth of a mile through tracks in a field before we entered the forest. There’s no possible way anyone could stumble across the Garretson well by accident, and we inadvertently entered the woods pretty far afield of where the well stood.
Evidence of water was pretty obvious, but somehow we’d missed the big tree branch Fred laid down when he hiked back to the well a couple weeks prior. We ducked out from under the branches and headed back north. A second after we returned to the trees, we found it!
I don’t know why, but coming across a flowing well is like a religious experience for me. Aside from the triumph of finding something mysterious and hidden, I feel connected to the ancient past, somehow in awe of the power of the divine. The Garretson well was no different.
It flows from within a stand of trees next to where the old road once ran. Below it is what remains of a concrete trough that once collected water to quench the thirst of cattle grazing nearby. Aside from its open top, the well has two holes for water to flow out of. The upper hole is original, while the lower one was drilled during a period of fallow pressure around the Great Depression, Fred related.
We hung out at the well for about fifteen minutes and filled four jugs of water. Afterwards, Fred and I emerged from the forest scratched up and bloody. I wouldn’t have it any other way! Part of being a historian, even an amateur one, is getting down and dirty in the muck to document things like the Garretson well. Although it was easy to see more than fifty years ago when Fred first learned of it, it takes some hacking and slashing -or at least some ducking and batting- to find it today.
The Danforth well
Finding the Garretson well would have been enough for me, but Fred had another trick up his sleeve: today, it sits on Herbert Likens’ property. When Fred asked him if we could go check it out, Herbert mentioned another well on his land that stood somewhere west of the one Fred remembered. That’s the Danforth well, and Fred and Herbert hopped in his Gator to go find it.
Fred and I started calling it the Danforth well after Francis Marion Danforth, a farmer born in 1842 who owned 267 acres when the Indianapolis Gas Company drilled it on his land. It’s hard to comprehend today based on how remote it is, but the old road to Perkinsville went right past the thing in 1901! Fred and I started searching for the well by approaching it on foot from the west.
Soon enough, we encountered what we believed to be a segment of the abandoned road, marked by a pair of tree lines. Headed east, the old road met with a newer dirt path that looked to have seen some enhancements made for BMX bikes. We followed it through the woods for half a mile before making it to the back of the ridge where the well sets, just across the river from an island. With no easy way of descending to the other side, we backtracked, hopped in the car, and grabbed the Gator to approach from the east as Fred and Herbert Likens had.
That’s where the adventure began: we took the Gator from Herbert Likens’ house on County Road 300-North to old 775-West. Instead of continuing down it, we made a beeline for the fence at the top of the sixty-foot-tall bank leading down to the river. Places with high banks are ideal locations for artesian wells because their water is confined between impermeable strata beneath the rest of the water table. It wants to seek its own level, so it flows up and out!
I was sure we’d tip over, but we got to the bottom pretty quickly and drove past the fields to ford a creek. We soon made it to the Danforth well, which sits about two hundred feet back from the White River. Despite how close it is, I’d imagine that anyone paddling past would be hard-pressed to see it! Although it was drilled by a rival company, the well features the same tall standpipe as the Garretson well. Water only trickled out from the top; most flowed out from near ground level.
I’m grateful to Fred Schrope for securing permission to check these wells out and taking me out to see them. In addition to bringing a sense of clarity and focus to a chaotic mind, flowing water has the power to calm and soothe a restless soul. It always has for me, at least, but maybe there’s something to that since Bill Simmermon lived to be 101 years old and F.M. Danforth’s son Frank lived to be ninety-eight! I’m thirty-two but feel ninety-eight, so hopefully the gallon I chugged works its way through me posthaste.
The Garretson and Danforth wells were the seventh and eighth I’ve been to in Madison County. I know of a ninth and tenth in Chesterfield, and I’m pretty sure I’ve been to the site of an eleventh near Summitville. As always, I’ll keep on searching for them, updating my artesian well map, and writing about them here.
Sources Cited
1 Well Events For IGWS ID: 142815 (2023). Well Record tables. The Indiana Geological & Water Survey. Indiana University. Web. Retrieved July 9, 2023.
2 (1901). Jackson Township. An atlas of Madison County, Indiana. map, Cleveland, OH; American Atlas Company.
3 History of Madison County, Indiana: With Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers. To which are Appended Maps of Its Several Townships (1880). Kingman Brothers [Chicago]. Book.
4 Probate Garretson Will. (1931, February 7). The Elwood Call-Leader. p. 8.
5 Garrettson-Simmermon (1916, July 31). The Elwood Call-Leader. p. 3.
6 Helm, T.B. (1880). History of Madison County, Indiana, with illustrations and biographical sketches of some of its prominent men and pioneers. Unigraphic [Evansville]. Book.
8 Well Events For IGWS ID: 142814 (2023). Well Record tables. The Indiana Geological & Water Survey. Indiana University. Web. Retrieved July 9, 2023.
