Flowing wells feel almost supernatural in winter as pockets of motion when everything else has gone still. That said, there’s nothing mystical about why they keep running when the thermometer dips: deep groundwater maintains a remarkably stable temperature year-round. Even on days when standing water turns solid, the water emerging from a flowing well like Granville’s begins its journey already above freezing. It just keeps moving.
I’ll never forget the first time I stumbled across Granville’s flowing artesian well. It was close to midnight and I was twenty, wired from a call-center shift and nowhere near ready to head home and crash. Back then, the best cure for a long night was a long drive, so I’d wander the countryside with no real destination. I eased my car over an old iron bridge on one particular night. Suddenly, I found myself face-to-face with two massive boulders that -honest to God- seemed to be gushing with water! I just sat there, stunned. In the glow of my headlights, it felt less like a roadside oddity and more like a small, private miracle.
Nowadays, I know the flowing well near Granville wasn’t some Biblical sign. I’ve been by it a hundred times since then, but never in the winter. Aside from temperature, another key factor that keeps it gushing is the nature of artesian pressure itself: flowing wells tap confined aquifers- underground layers of water held between impermeable rock. When a well reaches those depths, the stored pressure pushes the water upward without the need for a pump.
Moving water is far less likely to freeze than still water. Even when ice forms around the edges of a flowing well in deep winter, the center continues to spill out because the source of the water isn’t exposed to the cold at all. It’s shielded by soil, rock, and sometimes miles of earth that insulate it from day-to-day swings in air temperature.
The artesian well at Granville once served as a gas well that lit streetlights in the nearby village. Today, it empties into a pipe that goes under the road to drain into the Mississinewa River. Mysterious notions of awestruck realizations aside, the artesian well near Granville ought to keep flowing and flowing until the end of time- in all sorts of weather.
