I hadn’t visited a new artesian well since August 2025. The drought has been painful, but a reader named Jocelyn came to my rescue on Monday. In an email, she tipped me off to an artesian well that wasn’t on my map! I ‘d just gotten out of the dentist’s office pretty miserable and swollen, but the prospect of an undiscovered flowing well was too tempting to ignore. In a flash, I pointed the car toward Henry County and set off to investigate. If true, it’d become my fiftieth artesian well.
It’s been a while since I’ve given a recap regarding what an artesian well is. Unless they provide small-batch, locally-sourced spring water with a rustic label at the local farmer’s market, they differ from artisan wells pretty substantially. Instead, artesian wells tap into a confined underground aquifer where natural pressure forces the water upward. They’re prominent around these parts because of the Indiana gas boom from more than a century ago. In some places, water took over once the gas ran dry.
Jocelyn was kind enough to provide me with some helpful coordinates in her email. The half-hour drive from Muncie to rural Henry County got scenic once I arrived at the rolling hills the old Muncie Pike traverses west of Summit Lake. Thankfully, the road evened out just as I rolled up to the well and pulled over. The well was dry. Near it stood a repurposed green road sign imploring “DO NOT DRINK / CONTAMINATED / BOARD OF HEALTH.”
As an aside, it appeared as though the horizontal board of health sign had once been vertical. Viewed at an angle, it read “ROAD REPAIR AHEAD.”
I saw the sign but turned my attention to the well itself. It was a simple but intriguing setup; a length of galvanized pipe emerged from the ground at an angle before connecting to an older, rust-streaked pipe by way of an elbow joint. Near the end, the water once spilled into a circular drain about the size of a manhole cover. From there, I suspect it made its way into nearby Harvey Run, a small stream that heads due west before joining the Big Blue River roughly two-fifths of a mile away.
When I got home, I looked the well up on the Indiana Geological and Water Survey’s Petroleum Database Management System, a web map showing thousands of old gas wells. Weirdly, but not unprecedentedly, this one didn’t show up. I like to call the flowing wells I find after the landowners who deeded them to the gas company, but in lieu of that, I decided to refer to this one the Muncie Pike well.
The Muncie Pike well appears on four instances of Google Street View spanning from 2009 to 2025. Unfortunately, it only appears to have flowed in the 2009 image. Is its present condition permanent? I have no idea. Fortunately, I just bought a 33-foot USB-C endoscope to stuff down its casing to investigate. It arrived yesterday, and I can’t wait to go out and take another look.
