Mounds State Park in Anderson, Indiana, is an awesome place for history lovers. The 290-acre property features ten 2,000-year-old Adena and Hopewell earthworks believed to align with celestial events1, a brick homestead built in the 1840s or 50s2, and even the remains of an amusement park3! That’s all well, good, and even intriguing, but my favorite spot is Mounds’ artesian well. It’s finally flowing freely again.
What’s now Mounds State Park was once home to the Adena culture, who built the park’s namesake earthworks around 250 B.C. The largest, the Great Mound, is 390 feet across with nine-foot-tall outer embankment surrounding a ten-foot deep ditch and a four-foot central platform4. It’s breathtaking! Other prominent mounds, known now as Fiddleback and Circle, were constructed nearby.
I’ve been to Mounds State Park many times over the years, on field trips in school, to hike, to enjoy nature, and to aimlessly poke around. Still, going inside the old Bronnenberg house is something that’s evaded me. I’ve never even taken a picture! The family was well-known as farmers and industrialists throughout the area and, aside from ensuring that the mounds were respected and preserved5, drilled tons of gas wells in the area6.
It’s not listed on a map of old gas and oil wells maintained by Indiana University, but I don’t doubt for a second that the flowing well near Mounds” northern border at the youth tent campground was one of the Bronnenberg’s. As seen time and time again elsewhere, the well casing probably cracked and allowed water from a pressurized aquifer to seep in, up, and out.
The well flowed freely when my parents visited during the pandemic around 2021, but it had been modified by the time I made it two years later: you could hear the water burbling inside if you got up close, but you had to turn a handle near the base of the well’s enclosure to get it to gush out from a spigot. What a bummer!
Fortunately, Mounds had another old flowing well to see; a remnant from its days as an amusement park. Near the park’s old boat landing on the White River, the well enclosure sits opposite the remains of a rock dam. At one time, tin cups were chained to its rim to provide patrons with cold sips7. Present-day park literature describes the site as the “remnants” of an artesian well, but it seems like it still flows from underneath the concrete structure below Trail 5. The red, iron-rich water is a dead giveaway.
My family recently had a Labor Day get-together at Mounds this year. As I was leaving, I circled over towards the tent camp area to see if the old well was flowing again. Much to my surprise, it wasn’t just flowing: it was gushing: maybe fourteen inches into the air!
That’s the kind of thing I love about Mounds State Park. The earthworks are its stars, and rightfully so, but nearly every trail seems to lead past another layer of history: the Bronnenberg family, the old amusement park, or, in this case, a pipe sticking out of a stone enclosure shooting water more than a foot into the air. I’m glad park personnel decided to let the old well flow freely again!
Over the past decade or so, I’ve learned that you can never take an artesian well for granted. They clog, collapse, get capped, or simply stop flowing without warning. For now, though, Mounds’ old well is doing exactly what it’s probably done for more than a century: pulling cold water from somewhere deep underground and sending it skyward. Among 2,000-year-old earthworks and the ruins of everything that came afterward, it’s one more piece of Mounds Park’s past that refuses to stay buried.
Sources Cited
1 Welcome to Mounds State Park (n.d.). Indiana Department of Natural Resources [Indianapolis]. Map.
2 McCord, B. (2006, January). The Bronnenberg House and 2005 Archaeological Investigations at MoundsState Park, Madison County, Indiana. Archaeological Resources Management Service. Ball State University [Muncie]. Web. Retrieved September 6, 2026.
3 Mounds State Park Interpretive Master Plan 2011 (2011). Indiana Department of Natural Resources [Indianapolis]. Web. Retrieved September 6, 2026.
4 Cochran, D. (1992) Adena and Hopewell Cosmology: New Evidence from East Central Indiana. Native American Cultures in Indiana. Minnetrista Cultural Center [Muncie]. pp. 26-42.
5 The Bronnenbergs (n.d.) Mounds State Park Interprative Services. Indiana Department of Natural Resources [Indianapolis]. Pamphlet.
6 Well Events For IGWS ID: 142673 (2023). Well Record tables. The Indiana Geological & Water Survey. Indiana University. Web. Retrieved April 23, 2023.
7 Hull, M. (n.d.) Mound Preservationist. The Madison County Historical Society. Web. Retrieved April 23, 2023.
