Sevier County, Tennessee, is packed with things to do. Between Dollywood, the Titanic Museum, the Island in Pigeon Forge, and all those alpine coasters, it’s easy to get swept up in the tourist whirlwind. Still, I decided to take a different path on a recent trip. Instead of chasing thrill rides, I went hunting for flowing wells. I think I found one! Or maybe it was a spring.
I’ve tracked down forty-seven flowing wells over the past few years, most of them scattered across East-Central Indiana. They go by a few different names: some people call them artesian wells in a nod to the old French province of Artois where twelfth-century Carthusian monks first perfected the art of drilling them. Others just call them springs. Here’s the catch, though: despite how often the terms get mixed up, wells and springs aren’t the same thing.
Both artesian wells and springs bring groundwater to the surface, but the way they do it sets them apart. An artesian well is man-made, drilled into a confined aquifer where water is trapped under pressure between layers of rock. Once tapped, that pressure forces the water upward on its own, often causing it to flow continuously without a pump.
A spring, on the other hand, is entirely natural. It appears where the groundwater table meets the land’s surface which allows water to flow out naturally, often along a hillside. In essence, a spring is nature’s outlet for groundwater, while an artesian well is humanity’s way of harnessing that same underground force.
That’s what makes me think the flowing well I found near Seymour, Tennessee, is actually a spring. Whatever it was, the Seymour well -or spring- sat about half an hour northwest of Sevierville. My mom, stepdad, and I piled into the truck and set out to find it. We flew down Chapman Highway, snaked along Shiloh Road, and cut across Boyds Creek Highway before twisting onto Porterfield Gap. There, just south of Kimberlin Heights, we finally tracked down the well.
Finding it wasn’t as easy as I thought it’d be. I don’t know why, but I’d pictured a neat PVC pipe jutting from the mountainside with a convenient pull-off across the road. That wasn’t the case! We cruised right past the coordinates the first time, pulled over to let an impatient motorcyclist roar by, then looped back around for another look. That’s when I caught it out of the corner of my eye: a plastic water bottle jammed into the rocky slope, with a steady stream of water spilling out. Bingo. I’d found the well! Or spring.
I hopped out of the truck to get a closer look. The ground squished beneath my Crocs as I trudged through the mud toward the spring- or well. The water gushed from the plastic bottle and splashed onto an old concrete pad.
There wasn’t a trace of that telltale red iron stain like I’m used to seeing back home. Curious, I cupped my hands and took a sip. The water was crisp, clean, and -best of all- free of that metallic tang I’ve come to expect from old artesian wells.
Still, I couldn’t shake how strange it felt- cupping my hands to drink from a stream that flowed through someone’s discarded water bottle. I set the bottle back against the mountainside, leaned in, and took another drink straight from the flow. This time it tasted even better! I stood there for a moment, savoring it, before kicking myself for not bringing my own bottle to fill.
Before we headed out, I took one last look around. The area surrounding the so-called well was damp, and I could see thin rivulets of water quietly threading their way down the mountainside, feeding the muddy ground below. It wasn’t gushing from a pipe or bubbling up from a drilled shaft; it was simply seeping, slow and steady, right out of the earth. I’m no hydrologist, but those subtle trickles told me everything I needed to know. Despite the hole in the rock, this wasn’t a man-made well at all-it was a genuine spring, hiding in plain sight.
As strange as it sounds, that little water bottle jammed into the mountainside ended up being one of my favorite stops in Sevier County. It wasn’t flashy or advertised, and there was no gift shop waiting at the end of the road. Instead, there was just a trickle of clear, cold water flowing straight from the earth. In an area built on tourism and spectacle, that simplicity felt refreshing in more ways than one.
