MOUNT VERNON — My recent column about searching for a mineral spring that spawned a health spa in early Knox County history prompted a reply from long-time reader (and long-time friend!) Russ McGibney.
I got to know Russ when I used to work at the Mount Vernon News, and Sips Coffee House was just a short walk away. It’s great to hear from him again.
Russ points out that there is a strong fountain at Camp Sychar, one that is known to have been there since the early years of the camp. The camp, located on Sychar Road, is a non-denominational Christian holiness camp, an outgrowth of the tent revival tradition of the 1800s. In the summer of 2021, the camp held its 150th session.
“…[W]hile I’m not sure they make any claims of its healing abilities,” he said, “there are people who do come specifically and take gallons of water home with them each year.” Russ added that he tries to get over and “get a good swig” when the fountain is running.
There are some excellent vintage pastcard images on the camp’s website, www.campsychar.org , and a detailed prehistory of the organization that eventually settled at Camp Sychar. One can easily see the potent symbolism of holding religious revivals at the site of a plentiful upwelling of water. That’s why springs, wells, and fountains have often been designated as holy sites for thousands of years of human history.
The science of it is fascinating. It is because of the exposure in Knox County and surrounding areas of a layer of porous rock that we have so many springs. One of the mightiest springs to come out of this aquifer is the mighty Niman Spring at Malabar Farm State Park, which gushes about 2,000 gallons of water every hour. That’s an impressive outpouring of groundwater.
Believe me, that’s not the situation everywhere in Ohio. I grew up in Crawford County, west of Mansfield, and I remember the farmhouse where I was raised, on Loss Creek Road, near the village of Tiro. The farmhouse had been built in the mid-1800s with a cistern to collect rainwater, due to the relative dryness of the ground in that area.
I remember my father hiring a well digger, Paul Bond, to bring his heavy truck in and drill for water. The noisy truck kept at it for days, bringing up a slurry of gray clay that covered part of the field next to the house. Every day Mr. Bond would inform my father that he had gone deeper, but still hadn’t found a good source of water.
“That’s Crawford County for you,” Bond said. “It’s bone dry.”
Dad encouraged him to keep going. After a week of drilling, he finally hit a modest, rather mineral-heavy source of water. It wasn’t great, but finally we had well water.
Knox County, on the other hand, happens to be located where one of the best aquifers in Ohio comes up to ground level, pouring forth its stored water both in natural springs and in excavated wells.
But, according to Kenneth O. Brown’s A History of Camp Sychar: Well of Water Ever Flowing, the camp’s fountain was not an existing spring, but rather one that was dug in 1888, soon after the founding of the camp site. Indeed, Brown says that the camp’s name was inspired by the fountain, which was named after the Biblical account in chapter four of the Gospel of John, where Jesus converts a Samaritan woman at the well of the city of Sychar in Samaria.
So, while the fountain at Camp Sychar was an answer to their prayer for a water source and a key part of the camp’s operation, it appears that the fountain was not the original site for the early Knox County health spa, leaving the Mount Vernon Developmental Center’s spring as the leading candidate … unless another source wells up.
