I’d been hearing troubling rumors that the flowing well near tiny Moonville, Indiana, had stopped flowing for about a year. I was curious to see it for myself, but I couldn’t find the time to stop and poke around until a few days ago. As it turns out, the rumors were correct- at least partially: water no longer bubbles up from the well’s vertical casing, but it still trickles down to Moon Branch as it has for more than a century.
I first wrote about Moonville’s flowing well in 2023. Sitting just a mile west of the Delaware/Madison line on River Valley Road, the well appears on the Indiana Geological & Water Survey’s Petroleum Database Management System map. It got its start as a gas well on land leased from Isham W. Burton, a Richland Township farmer who owned twenty-four acres spanning both sides of the creek1.
John Forkner’s 1897 history of Madison Township refers to the hamlet near the well as both Moonville and Moonsville2. INDOT maps show it as Moonville, but signs around the community say it’s Moonsville. Whatever it’s called, the place got its name from Zimri Moon, a Madison County pioneer3. At its apex, Moon(s)ville featured a schoolhouse, a cemetery, a blacksmith, a general store, and a post office4. Today, a typical traveler probably couldn’t identify it since the hamlet sits off any major thoroughfare and consists of little more than a cemetery, a sign, and a cluster of homes.
Then there was the flowing well. When I first visited eleven years ago and last stopped by in 2019, it was a sight to behold- a steady geyser of water shooting eight inches high from the top of its iron casing! It was the kind of unexpected, almost magical feature that felt like a secret tucked away. That memory made the recent rumors even harder to believe. Could a well that had flowed for over a century really have stopped? I had to see for myself.
When everything is as it should be, artesian wells flow on their own without the need for a pump. They work because they tap a pressurized aquifer in a valley where the water flows to what’s called the piezometric surface. Most of East Central Indiana’s artesian wells are left over from the gas boom that occurred around the turn of the twentieth century. After the gas was depleted, many old casings eventually cracked, which led water from confined aquifers to seep into them.
If the casing doesn’t crack or get gummed up, wells like Moonville’s tend to flow, and flow, and flow. I’m naive enough to think they’ll last forever! Most artesian wells have gone on for so long that they feel like permanent parts of the landscape, immune to change. As I pulled off River Valley Road, though, the rumors seemed to be true. I saw no sign of any flow, and my heart sank. Some water stood pooled in the pipe, but that was about it. The well had run dry.
Then I heard it- a soft, burbling sound of trickling water that snapped me out of my malaise. Like a thirsty traveler, I stepped past the old pipe toward the gorge that once carried the well’s outflow to Moon Branch. I was shocked to discover that the well was still flowing! It no longer bubbled from the top of the iron casing, but somewhere deeper, beneath the surface, the Moonville well was still alive.
Relief washed over me as I stood there, listening to the quiet persistence of the well as a couple of cars sped past on River Valley Road. The Moonville well wasn’t the bold, gushing landmark I remembered, but it hadn’t dried up completely. Instead, it had simply changed. Maybe that’s how it goes with places like this: time reshapes them and softens their presence, but it doesn’t erase them entirely. I’m glar that the Moonville well still flows, just in a quieter way. It carries on as it has for over a century.
Sources Cited
1 Madison County (1903, February 1). Oliver C. Steele [Spiceland]. Map.
2 Forkner, J. & Dyson, B. (1897). Historical Sketches and Reminiscences of Madison County, Indiana. book. Anderson, IN.
3 Greene, D. (1970, July 4). Seen and Heard in Our Neighborhood. The Muncie Star. p. 4.
4 Lawrence, D. (2020, August 15). Moonsville reflects on 50th anniversary of almost rock festival. The Anderson Herald Bulletin. Web. Retrieved April 22, 2023.
