I was in Elkhart on Saturday and chose to take a familiar path through Syracuse and North Webster on my way home. I’d driven that way many times, but something unusual caught my eye as I barreled towards Pierceton. A small shelter, hardly noticeable, stood by the roadside. My mind shifted into heightened awareness as soon as I noticed it. “Could it be? Is It really?” I wondered as I sped past. At the last moment, I spied water cascading from a spigot. It was a flowing well!
I shouted out, checked my blind spot, and quickly turned around. Noting signs that expressly prohibited parking within ten feet of busy State Road 13, I put the car at a safe angle to the highway and hopped out. The font I’d found was the Kuhn Lake well.
Truth be told, I already knew about the Kuhn Lake well, at least in the back of my mind. State Road 13 through Kosciusko County is an intriguing route packed with cool sights, and my dad loved to drive it from his home in Goshen to our house in Muncie after weekend visits. Those drives would have ended around 2008, but the Kuhn Lake well has been there far longer.
In 1879, the land the well sits on was owned by the M. Kline family1. The property lays a little too far north to be part of the Trenton Gas Boom that resulted in so many of East Central Indiana’s flowing wells, so I don’t know about the circumstances that led to its creation. I do know how it works, though.
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. Evidently, the flowing well at Kuhn Lake is pretty robust.
Aside from how the well works, I also know that the state maintained a rest stop on a high bluff immediately east called “Flowing Well Park” in the 1950s and 60s2. The park was a popular place to hold events. The Syracuse Goodwill Home Demonstration Club met at Flowing Well Park in the sixties, for example3.
Unfortunately, the sharp curve was also dangerous. In 1964, three people were injured when a car failed to navigate the highway and struck the guard rails that protected the well4. I can’t remember any car crashes there, but I do remember a blue “Point of Interest” sign that stood out front5. Unfortunately, nothing calls the place out today. The only signs are the pair that warn you not to park like a dummy.
The Kuhn Lake well flows from one casing spit in two. The pipe facing the road angles downward like a heavy-duty kitchen faucet, and the narrow one facing the hillside jets water out with a fair amount of force. Both streams empty into a stone basin that drains onto the floor into a metal grate that, presumably, feeds into Grass Creek nearby. The cold water tasted like iron, just like most other flowing wells I’ve been to.
I was thrilled to rediscover the Kuhn Lake well and stop, but I was close to two others on my way up to Elkhart. I passed the turnoff to Jalapa, where a flowing well sits near the 1812 Mississinewa Battlefield. Further up the road, I drove by another in Wabash that’s said to be contaminated. I wish I’d made time to stop at both! Nevertheless, I’m pleased that I’ve now found a whopping thirty-eight flowing wells! You’ll be the first to know once I make it to my thirty-ninth and fortieth.
Sources Cited
1 Kingman Brothers. (1879). History of Kosciusko County, Indiana with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches. Chicago, IL.
2 Photo Record (2017, November 22). Flowing Well on State Rod 13, North Webster, Indiana, circa 1955. Indiana Album [Indianapolis]. Postcard.
3 Club Meets For Picnic (1961, August 7). The South Bend Tribune. p. 4.
4 Ind. 13 Crash Injures Four In Kosciusko (1964, May 18). The South Bend Tribune. p. 4.
5 Ashley, T. (2016, March 20). Flowing well near Kuhn Lake. Localremnants [Goshen]. Retrieved June 1, 2024.
