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Video: The Bottomless Well of Water Street

  • Writer: Brandon Broughton
    Brandon Broughton
  • 27 minutes ago
  • 11 min read

Read The Bottomless Well of Water Street to learn more about Springfield's origins and John Polk Campbell's "bottomless well."



About This Video

It's been a year since Jaden and I first peered into the void that sits beneath Springfield's birthplace. There's a lot that I've learned in that time. I know more about the indigenous peoples who lived in and around what would become Springfield and how their presence and actions directly led to John Polk Campbell's "discovery" of the so-called bottomless well. I have a better understanding of the well's precise location and of its surroundings. I can even speculate with a bit more confidence as to the structure of those limestone channels that wind beneath Water Street.


But I also thought that I was more or less finished with this bottomless well business. I had learned what and where it was, its place in Springfield's early history, and had crawled beneath the National Audio Company to look upon (and more importantly, photograph!) that opening into the watery depths.


Last winter, I was contacted by students from Central High School's broadcast journalism team, "Central Intelligence." This team, consisting of Grant Pickett, Holton Carson, Alina Neal, and Rosie Killingsworth, were looking to make a documentary about my experience hunting down the bottomless well. They did an excellent job with this project, and I was happy to offer my assistance. However, there was one thing that I could not do for them: I could not accompany them to the site of the well itself. There were simply too many risks.


That's when I realized that I wasn't done yet. The history behind the bottomless well is one thing, but to actually be at that opening in the limestone, feet away from the underground body of water that gave rise to this city—well, it's one of those places where words fail. I can't physically lead people to that limestone threshold, but maybe I could do more to capture the experience of that journey.


So, in order to better serve our patrons and to prevent others from having to make what is, quite frankly, an unpleasant trip, Jaden and I once again ventured beneath the National Audio Company and made our way to the buried origins of Springfield—this time with cameras rolling. The footage from that site visit forms the spine of this video, and is available upon request.


I initially planned to edit the footage from that most recent trek into a sort of "virtual tour." However, it seemed important to me to also include enough historical context to underline the significance of the site. One thing led to another, and that virtual tour became something of a mini-documentary.


I have continued to learn more about this foundational piece of our local history. As a result, this video is already outdated in a few small ways. This is a project that truly resists completion. In that sense, I suppose that well really is bottomless.


Transcript

Well, let's get started.


The National Audio Company is already an interesting place. They're the country's last and the world's largest manufacturer of audio cassette tapes. But if you couldn't guess from how we're dressed, Jaden and I are not here to listen to music. We're here for what lies beneath this factory floor.


Now, I want to be clear. I didn't discover it. I wouldn't even say that I rediscovered it. Others knew that it was there. But when I found out about it, I just had to see it for myself.


But since then, I haven't been able to think about our city's history in quite the same way.

I want to make sense of this experience and I want to share that feeling with you. But words can only take us so far. So, we're going back and you're coming with us.

Back to the very origin of Springfield itself.


One more time: We're searching for the bottomless well of Water Street.


Let's go back to the beginning.


One day, a few years ago, I came across something odd in a 1909 issue of the Springfield Republican. In it, Martin J. Hubble, a local engineer and historian, wrote about something that seemed impossible:


"Colonel John Polk Campbell donated 50 acres for the county seat and included in the deed a bottomless well, which I think is in East Water Street. Thomas J. Epperson told me that he and another man tied two bed cords together and let them down and did not touch the bottom. I once pumped 1 million gallons of water out of it in 72 consecutive hours, and it did not lower the well."


Although my first instinct was to dismiss this bottomless well as some forgotten urban legend, something told me that it merited further investigation. So, I started with

Hubble's description, and from that, I narrowed the wells location down to a stretch of East Water Street between Robberson and Jefferson Avenue.


Then, I hit a wall. I couldn't find any mention of a bottomless well on Water Street, apart from Hubble's article, and I was beginning to think that I really had just fallen for some century old hoax.


But then I had an idea. This 1872 bird's eye map of Springfield depicts many

structures from that time. Could it have also included the well, or maybe a wellhouse? What I found instead was the little blue ribbon of Jordan Creek running right alongside what would become Water Street.


Duh. That's why it's called Water Street.


But this raised the question, could the truth behind the Bottomless Well somehow be connected to Jordan Creek? So, I searched our catalog for books about Jordan Creek and I got to reading. And I quickly learned that the bottomless well that I had been searching for wasn't some old-timer's tall tale after all. It was real. And more than that, it was the very birthplace of the city of Springfield.


I was familiar with the founding story of Springfield. How in 1829, John Polk Campbell discovered a cluster of springs along the bank of Jordan Creek and carved his initials into a nearby tree to stake his claim. In 1830, he returned and built his family homestead there. And the city of Springfield grew up around that site.


But it had never occurred to me that one of these springs and the bottomless well could be one and the same. And maybe that's because the bottomless well wasn't really a well at all. And it wasn't a spring either. The bottomless well was in reality what's known as a karst window. This is a sort of natural opening in the ceiling of a cave that exposes a body of water below.


This particular karst window sat in a limestone shelf sloping down to the banks of Jordan Creek and was located just a few yards north of what is today Founders Park. When water was drawn from this opening, it was quickly replenished by the flow from elsewhere in the cave system, creating the illusion of an endless, bottomless water supply. Maybe it was this phenomenon that made John Polk Campbell decide to build his homestead here in 1830 at the site of what would come to be known as the natural well.


The natural well supplied water for Springfieldians for decades to come and was even considered as a potential source for the city's first public water works. That's where

Martin Hubble comes in. In 1874, he really did pump nearly a million gallons of water out of the well in a test of its viability as a public utility. But in 1883, the city's first public waterworks was actually built elsewhere at Fulbright Spring. And as a result, the natural well fell into disuse.


First, the limestone shelf in which the natural well set was quarried. Then in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Jordan Creek was culverted to prevent flooding, and Water Street was essentially rebuilt on top of that covert. Campbell's bottomless well, Springfield's birthplace, was effectively buried beneath the city that it gave rise to.


But you already know that that is not how this story ends.


Because in 1929, a new opening was created mere feet away from the sight of the natural well:


"Engineers engaged in erecting the McGregor warehouse on Water Street recently broke through a crust of stone into a large subterranean cave. It was discovered that the cavity was at least 23 ft deep and of unknown width. Power-driven hydraulic pumps were applied to the reservoir of water in the cavern and after more than a half hour steady pumping had lowered the water level only one inch, attesting to the enormity of the cave."


Despite initial concerns about structural integrity, that building went up and was used as a warehouse by the McGregor Hardware Company, and in 1998 it was purchased by

the National Audio Company.


So, is it the same cavern that was beneath the natural well? The honest answer is maybe. The two features are almost certainly physically connected, the natural well being only about 150 ft east of this new opening. However, it's impossible to say with any certainty

whether this new opening looks into the same cavern that was beneath the natural well or if this is a separate cavern that is connected to the one beneath the natural well by a series of underground conduits running beneath Water Street.


That opening is still here at the southern end of this crawl space. And it's the closest that we can get today to the founding site of Springfield, Campbell's natural well. Except, is it really accurate to call it Campbell's Well, as if he were the one who discovered it? I mean, time doesn't begin in 1829 with Campbell standing over the natural well.


Let's go back to the beginning.


At the onset of the Ozark's written history, this region was the home of the Osage people. However, as a result of the 1808 Treaty of Fort Clark, the Osage lost most of their land in the Missouri Ozarks. Ten years later, the southwest corner of Missouri was divided into land grants for two more indigenous groups, both of whom had been forcibly removed from their ancestral lands. The northern half went to the Kickapoo, originally from the southern Great Lakes region, and the southern half was set aside for the Lenape Delaware, who for centuries had resided in the Delaware River Valley and its surroundings.


In the 1820s, these lands were legally the property of these indigenous groups. But that didn't stop some white settlers from the east from squatting in this region. Two of these settlers were John Polk and Ezekiel Madison Campbell, two brothers

in their twenties from Middle Tennessee.


The Campbell set out for the Ozarks in 1829. But things went awry that fall when they found themselves at the mercy of one of the Ozark's characteristic storms. Fortunately for them, they were not alone.


"My father, John Polk Campbell, and my uncle, Ezekiel Madison Campbell, took refuge from an autumnal storm in old Delaware town on the James, not far from the Wilson's Creek battleground."


Two hundred years ago, this piece of the James River Valley between Nixa and Clever was home to a sizable and cosmopolitan village in which the Delaware people lived between roughly 1820 and 1830. Today, we know it as Delaware Town.


The Campbell brothers were not the only beneficiaries of the Delaware's hospitality at that time.


"The braves just brought in a remnant of Kickapoos which they had rescued from the

Osages. Among the Kickapoos was a young brave boy ill with a kind of bilious fever recently taken."


Apparently, after reading one book on botany, John Polk Campbell considered himself to be some kind of herbal healer. And so he endeavored to treat the Kickapoo youth.


"Not understanding the condition of his patient, he threw the Kickapoo into a frightful cold sweat and deathly sickness. Then there was work for dear life."


Miraculously, the Kickapoo boy survived. What happened next is one of the most pivotal events in Springfield's history. This Kickapoo boy offered to show the

Campbell brothers a beautiful place not many miles north. They traveled up the James River, crossed the Kickapoo Prairie, and arrived here at what was

once the site of a Kickapoo village just south of today's downtown Springfield. North of there, in the limestone bluffs hemming in Jordan Creek, was the karst

window.


And we know the story from there. John Polk Campbell builds his homestead near the sight of the natural well and comes to be known as the founder of

Springfield. In the early 1830s, facing growing pressure from white settlers, both the Kickapoo and the Delaware leave the Ozarks for newly negotiated lands

near what would soon become Kansas City.


We're nearly there now. This is the culvert that opens up to the cavern. This is the opening. And this chamber below: Could this be the bottomless well of Water Street? Most likely it is connected to it. But whether it's the same chamber or just another part of a more complex underground structure isn't a question that we can answer at this time.


I joke that it's just a hole in the ground, but in reality, it feels more like a threshold between the present and the past. Even the rock that it sits in, limestone, tells a story about the deep time past of the Ozarks.


One more time: Let's go back to the beginning.


Half a billion years ago, the Ozarks was the floor of a shallow sea dotted with reefs teeming with animals such as crinoids, relatives of starfish. As these animals lived and died, they left behind the calcium in their bodies, slowly forming a thick layer of limestone. When you look at a piece of local limestone, it's easy to focus on the fossils. But the stone itself was once also part of a living. These lithified animal remains form the

bedrock of the Ozarks.


And over hundreds of millions of years, the flow of water has carved that limestone into valleys and bluffs, but also subterranean caves, hidden labyrinths upon which no light has ever shone.


The bottomless well was here before Water Street was paved. And it'll be here when this building is gone, when Springfield is merely history, and it'll be here when that history is forgotten.


But my hope is that today at this particular opening into the dark, we've managed to keep just a little light shining.


And well, I suppose that's all we can do, isn't it?


Sources



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