Read time: 15 min.

Despite its unconventional name, Glen Miller Park in Richmond has nothing to do with the famous bandleader who spelled his name with two Ns. Sometime after the civil war, Col. John F. Miller purchased a glen, or valley, to turn into a park. Miller sold the property to the city of Richmond in 1885¹. Although the place is home to fascinating history, I went there specifically for its artesian wells, known around Richmond as “springs.”

I had a good, old-fashioned, adventure last time I visited some new-to-me artesian wells. Finding them involved roaming abandoned roads, blazing a trail through the trees, and careening down a fifty-foot slope to the banks of the White River! Finding the wells at Glen Miller wasn’t as dramatic, but it was an adventure nonetheless since it took me three trips over two days to locate them all. I found five.

Here’s the story: my mom had a morning meeting in Richmond last Saturday. I remembered hearing about a spring at Glen Miller Park that I assumed was a flowing well in disguise, so I asked if I could ride with her, run to Glen Miller, grab some photos and a swig of water, and come back to pick her up. She agreed to let me tag along.

I drove to the park and quickly found the first well. People often confuse them, but wells and springs actually differ from a hydrological standpoint: the main distinction is that artesian wells are drilled or bored into a pressurized aquifer, while springs occur when groundwater rises to the surface naturally. 

It’s similarly pedantic to explain the difference between “flowing” wells and “artesian” wells since I often use them interchangeably. Unfortunately, there’s a catch: all free-flowing wells are artesian wells, but only some artesian wells flow freely. It has to do with topography and confined aquifers, as you can see in the infographic above.

“Artesian” refers to the old French province of Artois, where Carthusian monks were known to drill this kind of well during the twelfth century. All the artesian wells I’ve written about here are “flowing artesian wells,” but I’ll play along and refer to all of the parks as springs for the rest of this post.

As the developer of Glen Miller Park, Col. John Miller is credited as the first person to drill a spring at the land since he had iron pipes bored into the ground when it was under his ownership. One near the deepest part of the glen caused water to spout several feet into the air! It became the park’s first spring, and others followed later².

“Spring Water Spring”

One of the later springs was the first one I found. Locals call it Spring Water or Fresh Water Spring³, and it sits about seven hundred feet north of the park’s Rosegarden Drive entrance off US-40. Although flowing water is hard to see from the driveway, the bridge that leads to the wells is impossible to miss- just look at it in the postcard above!

A wooden crossing led park patrons across the stream to the spring⁴ in its earliest days, and a “stone house⁵” that surrounded the water was completed in 1908. Back then, the Spring Water Spring was known as the “Chautauqua” spring⁶, a name derived from Chautauqua assemblies, a type of educational and cultural gathering popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The first stone bridge to the spring was completed in 1922. It featured a 4.5-foot tall arch, eight-foot columns with ornamental lights, and paved areas that framed the springs⁷. Eventually, the span was simplified to the appearance it takes today, but it’s still an impressive landmark.

I hadn’t researched the spring at Glen Miller Park before I visited. I was delighted to find two pipes with flowing water since a someone was busy filling some plastic milk jugs at one of them. I was in no hurry, so I went over to the unoccupied spring to the south and started poking around.

The Spring Water Springs are situated near concrete troughs about a foot underground and flow at about a gallon a minute. That’s ungodly slow compared to nearly every other artesian well I’ve been to, but the wait was worth it: their water was the I’ve ever tasted- better than Fiji and evian, for sure!

I filled and drank a bottle while I waited to examine the other spring. It was just after eight in the morning, and a woman on her way to work pulled up just as I finished my third bottle. She headed to the southern pipe, so I made a beeline for the northern one.

Aside from a rickety metal railing I didn’t tempt by leaning, the arrangement at the northern spring was similar to the southern one. Water poured from a curved pipe embedded into the concrete and emptied into a rectangular basin. The flow rate of the northern spring was the same as its southern counterpart, and I filled a fourth bottle.

Newspaper articles I’ve found confirm that the springs at Glen Miller have natural, artesian origins⁸. It’s interesting that neither outflow tasted like iron or left the tell-tale orange stains so common to typical artesian wells. 

I’m not a hydrologist, but I wonder if that’s because of the depths to which they’re drilled: the springs at Glen Miller Park go about fifteen to twenty-five feet underground while flowing wells first drilled to extract natural gas can extend more than a thousand feet into the bedrock⁹. Maybe someone smarter than me will pipe up with the answer.

Cook’s Spring

Mom’s meeting was ending soon, and I left the park to pick her up after a few minutes at the spring. I was a little early, so I pulled my phone out again and went a-Googlin’. Before long, an image search returned a postcard that looked nothing like what I’d just seen, and that’s how I learned about Cook’s Spring. Some quick work on Google Maps spat out its location, and mom and I headed back to Glen Miller Park for my second trip.

As I understand it, Cook’s Spring was the original spring that Col. Miller drilled into the deepest part of Glen Miller’s valley. When officials decided to build a dam and create a lake, a pipe was attached to Miller’s initial casing to reroute the spring to the southern bank of the lake.

The lake’s water level was increased again in 1895, so another iron pipe was attached to move the spring to the eastern bank. That year, Wayne County Treasurer William P. Cook decided to build a suitable home for it. With the help of Park Commissioners Joseph Ratliff, Joseph Milliken, and Robert Jenkins, a stone grotto bearing Cook’s name was soon erected¹⁰.

The grotto lasted long enough to be memorialized in postcards but was ruined by vandals shortly after it was built. Officials ordered most of its remains demolished, but the spring kept flowing from its decimated home until 1935 when workers dredging the lake caught the underwater pipe on a piece of construction equipment and snapped it¹¹. There went the spring.

Residents clamored to repair the spring and build its surroundings back up. Unfortunately, no one remembered where it started flowing underwater! Someone eventually suggested that they shoot compressed air into the dry casing on the hillside, and a geyser erupted in the exact spot the pipe had broken!

Officials repeated the process, shooting air through the rusty waterworks and chasing eruptions across the lake until they reached the spring’s source. A temporary dam was built around the original casing so a new pipe could supply Cook’s Spring with water once again¹².

The restored spring reopened in 1936 with new lights but without its enclosed grotto¹³. By 1942, officials admitted the difficulty of keeping its waters sanitary¹⁴ and unhooked the pipe shortly afterward. By 1965, the long-closed spring -once the pride of Glen Miller Park- was nothing more than a platform for kids to fish. Today, the original spring supplies the lake with water¹⁵.

These days, the remains of Cook’s Spring are accessible by two pairs of ancient stone stairs that arc down to the bank and frame its old pipe and stone trough. The ruins are captivating and sad: although the spring no longer flows, it connects the dreams of the past with the reality of the present, reminding us that nothing -even artesian wells and springs- is permanent.

Back to Spring Water Spring

Mom and I lingered at Cook’s Spring for a while, and I pointed out the Spring Water Spring on our way home. I’d noticed a stone outcropping with some steps down to the creek bank earlier, but hadn’t paid much attention since it was fifty feet from the spring and appeared to simply serve as an access point for the stream. Mom has an eagle eye, though, and saw water coming out of it.

We examined the spring from across the creek before I waded across. It was another spring trickling down into a rectangular basin! Plants and algae bloomed below its outflow, but they didn’t stop me from cupping my hands to take a drink. The water tasted the same as the others, with no hint of rust or iron. In an instant, I realized why people were filling gallons and gallons for themselves when I first rolled up. I scolded myself for not bringing some of my own!

I don’t know if the three pipes at Spring Water Spring represent three individual springs or whether they’re all plumbed to one casing drilled into the creek bed. Nevertheless, finding a third pipe at Spring Water Spring wasn’t the first time my mom’s saved my bacon over the past thirty-two years, and I’m glad both of us stopped. It would have been humiliating to leave Glen Miller -an hour from my house- having missed one of its springs.

Of course, that’s exactly what happened.

Iron Water Spring

I started researching Glen Miller Park the second I got home by spending a couple hours absorbing information from old newspaper articles before I switched to a Richmond history group on social media. I saw a lot of photos of the springs I’d been to, then turned white as I came across one I didn’t recognize. Just as I feared, I’d missed the so-called “Iron Water Spring.” It sat somewhere far northeast of where Mom and I had been.

Glen Miller Park is nearly two hundred acres, and we had only spent a few minutes driving around two specific parts of it. Nevertheless, I felt mighty stupid missing one of its springs- stupid and obsessive! I couldn’t wait until Mom planned to return to Richmond in August, so I went back down on my own to find the Iron Water Spring the next day.

The Iron Water Spring is sometimes known as the North Spring¹⁶ or the Lincoln Spring¹⁷. The “north” name is self-explanatory, but the spring took the Lincoln name from Lincoln Rock, a gigantic boulder nearby that was dedicated in memory of the Great Emancipator in 1909 on his hundredth birthday¹⁸.

Entering the park from the northwest, I took Grand Boulevard onto Lakeshore Drive and headed east. The road changes into Cypress Drive, and I soon realized I was leaving the park! I turned back around, drove slowly, and found a place to pull off. There, a couple feet below the gravel lot, stood the Iron Water Spring.

Like the third Spring Water Spring casing my mom spied, the Iron Water Spring flows into a trough behind a decorative stone wall. Unlike the others, the water stains its basin and the bed of a small creek that trickles down into the woods with its namesake element. The interactive Indiana Geological Survey oil and gas well map doesn’t list the Iron Water Spring as an old gas well, but I wonder if it is since it has that telltale iron taste.

Although it’s accessed by a concrete path today, the Iron Water Spring was once reached by a wooden set of stairs installed by Benjamin Starr around 1890. Before Starr moved the steps to Glen Miller, they led to a scaffold in front of the Wayne County jail where Nathaniel Bates, the only man ever executed in Richmond, was hung in 1886! Several years later, Starr placed them at the spring to serve a more benevolent purpose for the community¹⁹. Unfortunately, the aging steps were removed in 1925.

Did I find the remains of a sixth spring?

I took pictures and video at the Iron Water Spring before I headed home. Once I got back, I remembered something interesting I’d seen: I was waiting for my turn at the second Spring Water Spring on Saturday morning when I saw a clearing in the woods. I followed it about a hundred feet southeast and stumbled across a stone wall similar to those at the springs.

Peering over, I noticed a strange rectangular basin dug into the ground. Rocks and bricks stood out like tiny islands amidst some standing water, while a taller stone retaining wall with some drainage outlets stood further back. I wondered if I’d happened across the remains of a sixth spring!

I took some photos but didn’t spend much time there after I noticed that the north spring was available. As I was writing this later, I posted my pictures on the Historic Richmond Indiana Photos Facebook group to see if someone could help me identify what I’d stumbled across. Results poured in. 

Some said I’d found the remains of another old spring, and others said it was left over from an old horse barn. Several people told me it was the foundation of an old shelter house or a bear enclosure! Aside from the springs, Col. Miller added driveways, a Catalpa grove, a bathhouse, a casino, the lake, and all kinds of other structures and landscaping as he developed the park nearly a century and a half ago! I think the park’s old bear den was located closer to its tennis courts, but I think most of those suggestions are plausible.

Whatever it was, the mysterious infrastructure I stumbled across is now part of Glen Miller’s heritage, and I suspect the old park has more secrets to reveal. It’s a dynamic place full of architectural heritage, historical artifacts, impressive gardens, and my reason for going, its great flowing springs.

Glen Miller Park has a lot to offer a history enthusiast, and its springs are a study in contrasts: nature’s reclamation of Cook’s Spring has led to a sense of elegance seen through a lens of decay, but the park’s other lively springs remain dynamic across three centuries. Although much of it might echo Richmond’s past promise, Glen Miller Park is still a vibrant place with grandeur, symbolism, and mystery seemingly frozen in time. I can’t wait to make it back and learn more about the place. I wouldn’t be surprised if more springs await discovery.

Sources Cited
1 Warrick, C. (1977, July 24). Filling those jugs. The Richmond Palladium-Item. p. 8.
2 Haas, E.M. (1935, September 12). Park’s Traveling Spring Is Lost, Found Again. The Richmond Palladium And Sun-Telegram. p. 8. 
3 Field, B. Historic Richmond Indiana Photos (2018, September 19). I’m not sure which roads are considered “Lower” and which is “North”. I took the newer photos and they are down [Comment]. Facebook.
4 Bridge At Spring In Glen Finished (1922, August 12). The Richmond Palladium And Sun-Telegram. p. 2.
5 Improvements At Glen Miller Park (1908, February 26). The Richmond Item. p. 1.
6 Dizzy But Interesting Dope For Water Lovers (1913, August 26). The Richmond Palladium Item and Sun-Telegram. p. 2.
7 (See footnote 4).
8 Engle, B. (1999, January 26). High water forces springs to close. The Richmond Palladium-Item. p. 3.
9 Gerhart, L. (1982, September 18). Artesian about in Delaware County – wells, that is. The Muncie Evening Press. p. 3.
10 (See footnote 2).
11 (See footnote 2).
12 Haas, E.M. (1942, April 7). How Many Recall Old High Point Hotel? The Richmond Palladium-Item. p. 12 12 Park’s New Spring Ready for Use (1936, May 13). The Richmond Palladium And Sun-Telegram. p. 11.
13 (See footnote 12).
14 (See footnote 12).
15 Old Glen Miller Park Fountain Area Now Used By Young Fisherman To Try Their Luck (1965, November 26). The Richmond Palladium-Item and Sun-Telegram. p. 9.
16 Field, B. Historic Richmond Indiana Photos (2018, September 18). Shame that its condition has deteriorated so much over the years.  First photo was taken by another member in the [Post]. Facebook.
17 Lincoln Spring at Glen Miller Park Temporarily Closed (1930, September 16). The Richmond Item. p. 14.
18 Lincoln Rock At Glen Dedicated On Centennial Of Emancipator’s Birth (1947, July 27). The Richmond Palladium-Item. p. 6.
19 (See footnote 12).