Sevier County, Tennessee, is packed with things to do. Between Dollywood, the Titanic Museum, the Island in Pigeon Forge, and all those alpine coasters, it’s easy to get swept up in the tourist whirlwind. Still, I decided to take a different path on a recent trip. Instead of chasing thrill rides, I went hunting for flowing wells. I think I found one! Or maybe it was a spring.
I’ve tracked down forty-seven flowing wells over the past few years, most of them scattered across East-Central Indiana. They go by a few different names: some people call them artesian wells in a nod to the old French province of Artois where twelfth-century Carthusian monks first perfected the art of drilling them. Others just call them springs. Here’s the catch, though: despite how often the terms get mixed up, wells and springs aren’t the same thing.
Both artesian wells and springs bring groundwater to the surface, but the way they do it sets them apart. An artesian well is man-made, drilled into a confined aquifer where water is trapped under pressure between layers of rock. Once tapped, that pressure forces the water upward on its own, often causing it to flow continuously without a pump.
A spring, on the other hand, is entirely natural. It appears where the groundwater table meets the land’s surface which allows water to flow out naturally, often along a hillside. In essence, a spring is nature’s outlet for groundwater, while an artesian well is humanity’s way of harnessing that same underground force.
That’s what makes me think the flowing well I found near Seymour, Tennessee, is actually a spring. Whatever it was, the Seymour well -or spring- sat about half an hour northwest of Sevierville. My mom, stepdad, and I piled into the truck and set out to find it. We flew down Chapman Highway, snaked along Shiloh Road, and cut across Boyds Creek Highway before twisting onto Porterfield Gap. There, just south of Kimberlin Heights, we finally tracked down the well…