It’s been four years since I learned about two flowing wells near Middletown, Indiana. I posted about them in June, and a variation of “Cunningham’s Law” led me to a third just a thousand feet away from the first. A Facebook friend reminded me about it during those dreary days after Christmas, and I finally decided to go out and see it.
Cunningham’s Law is credited to Ward Cunningham, a computer programmer who developed the wiki. It states “the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer1.” I’ve never knowingly written something false here, but my post about the two wells near Middletown last year was strategic.
Flowing wells are everywhere around East-Central Indiana, and the Pugsley and Deer Creek wells sit in the Fall Creek watershed. I understand the topography and reasoned there might be more I hadn’t heard about yet. I decided to employ a variation of Cunningham’s Law I made up, which says “The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post a partial answer.”
Responses directing me to the third well started flooding my inbox within minutes. I was ecstatic! I’ve loved artesian wells since I first bumbled past one ten or eleven years ago. I’ve been tracking them down ever since. Unfortunately, I had to wait until the corn was harvested to claim my thirty-sixth, the third flowing well near Middletown. It sits six hundred feet west of Raider Road, just south of Fall Creek.
People often use the terms “artesian well” and “flowing well” interchangeably. They’re pretty much the same in a square-rectangle sense, but here’s the difference: all flowing wells are artesian wells, but only some artesian wells flow. Artesian wells allow water to escape from a pressurized aquifer through a pipe towards the highest point of the water table, an imaginary line called the piezometric surface.
“Flowing” artesian wells sit low enough in a valley for the water to come up and out without a pump. The water in a “non-flowing” artesian well still reaches the piezometric surface, but doesn’t come out of the casing. It all depends on the height of the water table at a given moment, and one near Yorktown in Mount Pleasant Cemetery is notoriously fickle in that way.
None of that was a problem at the third well near Middletown. In central Indiana, most flowing wells are relics from the gas boom that occurred around the turn of the twentieth century. In 1893, the Lipes family owned the land this well was drilled on2. After the gas ran out, the casing probably cracked until water seeped in, up, and out.
The Lipes well sits at 930 feet above sea level and feeds a pond. Here’s another look at why it flows: the water table reaches elevations ten and twenty feet above the surrounding land as seen in this topographic overlay. Water seeks its own level, so it rises through the well casing to reach the higher piezometric surface. Today, the it sports a gate valve to regulate its flow.
All three of the wells I’ve been to near Middletown flow with enough force to spray several feet out from their casings. I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that are more nearby just waiting to be discovered! Maybe Cunningham’s Law, or at least my variation of it, will come into good use once again.
Sources Cited
1 McGeady, S. (2010, May 31). Jurisimprudence. The New York Times [New York]. Web. Retrieved December 30, 2023.
2 The County of Henry Indiana; Topography, History, Art Folio (1893). Rerick Brothers [Richmond]. Map.
There is one about three miles north of Chesterfield, just to thecwest of Big Killbuck Creek. It only flows now when there is a surge of rain. What does it need to get back to flowing all of the time, like it used to?
I hadn’t heard of that one. I’ll have to go find it! It might just need dredged out.
Hi Marlena- Is that the flowing well just south of Moonville? If so, I’ve been there!
I love Cunningham’s law, and have found it to be true.