After I got home from yesterday’s disappointing dry artesian well, a series of questions popped into my head. What does the inside of a flowing well look like when it isn’t flowing? Is the pipe clogged? Has it collapsed somewhere underground? Is there still water deeper down, waiting to find its way to the surface once it rains? Thanks to my Ko-fi supporters, I now possess a device poised to satisfy my local-history-and-artesian-well-related curiosities! Maybe I can find my thirty-year-old Hot Wheels Bugatti while I’m at it.

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.

The flowing well at Mt. Pleasant Cemetery in rural Delaware County is downright melodramatic, more so than any other I know. Sometimes, it gushes away like a champ! On other days, it practically seems dead. The well refused to flow when I stopped by back in February, but I was pleased to find water pouring out yesterday. If you want to fill a jug, now’s your chance! 

A recent drive through the frozen backroads of Delaware County sent me chasing a winter mystery: how were the old artesian wells holding up in the cold? There, near one of three “high banks” in the area, the Lennington well was still doing what it’s always done! Over at Mt. Pleasant Church Cemetery, though, the story was different. Just a third of a mile south, it was dry. 

Some places in the countryside don’t look like much at first glance. There’s no historic marker, no crumbling brick, and no story spelled out in bronze. Sometimes, just a patch of grass along a rural road and the faint suggestion that something unusual is happening underground is enough for me to stop! Most often, those are flowing wells. Unfortunately, the one I most recently passed isn’t flowing. 

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.

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.