Read time: 3 min.

Back in October, I swore to you that there was a flowing well hiding in the tall grass of a Grant County pasture. I’d visited the old Kirkwood well before, but this time something felt different: beneath the weeds, I could hear water gurgling at the base of the casing instead of trickling down its trough. Something had changed! I left that day with a promise to return and figure out what was really going on. In December, I finally did.

As East-Central Indiana experienced a gas boom around the turn of the twentieth century, the Indiana Natural Gas and Oil Company¹ drilled a well on John D. Kirkwood’s land². A prominent Grant County farmer, Kirkwood was the brother of a widely-known Muncie violin maker³. 

Kirkwood’s well plunges 975 feet into the earth⁴, but its casing cracked after the Trenton Gas Field ran dry around 1910. That fracture allowed groundwater to seep in, rise through the shaft, and escape at the surface in a steady flow that continues to this day. The well hides about six hundred feet west of Hoppas Ditch on the Grant County side of Delaware County Road 1300-North. 

I first visited the well in the summer of 2019. Back then, water flowed from the bottom of the metal casing, up an S-pipe, into the top of a rectangular metal trough. When I returned in October, though, something was off. Instead of rising up the pipe, the water merely seeped from the bottom of the casing, pooling where it shouldn’t.

I had to wait for the weeds and tall grass to die back before I could really see what had happened, but the truth was hard to miss- the old Kirkwood well is broken. The S-pipe at the base of the casing has failed, and with it went the gentle ritual of water flowing into the trough. What remains isn’t so much a flow anymore as a quiet pooling. Water still trickles from the base of the casing, but it lingers instead of rushing onward. 

Standing there with the grass flattened and its mechanism laid bare, I realized that even in its compromised state, the old Kirkwood well still tells a story of boom and bust, unintended consequences, and of how the landscape adapts after the industry that shaped it has moved on. It may be broken, but the Kirkwood well is still a fascinating piece of gas boom history.

Sources Cited
1 Well Events for IGWS ID: 136241 (2003). The Indiana Geological & Water Survey. Indiana University. Web. Retrieved January 30, 2023.
2 Westlake, W. B. (1903) Map of Grant County, Indiana. Madison, Ind.: W.B. Westlake. Map. 
3 Death of John D. Kirkwood (1905, May 8). The Muncie Morning Star. p. 10.
4 Indiana Oil and Gas Well Records Viewer (2023). Map. Indiana Department of Natural Resources. Web. Retrieved January 30, 2023.