This large rough-stone fountain once sat in Riverside Park on West High Street in Mount Vernon. Note also the smaller fountain behind it. Credit: Image courtesy of the History Knox Collection.

History Knox

Mark Sebastian Jordan authors a column each Saturday reflecting on the community's history.

MOUNT VERNON — Long-time History Knox reader Scott Brenneman was struck by a memory when he saw the picture of the fountain which used to sit at the intersection of Division and East Gambier Streets in Mount Vernon.

It reminded him of something he’d seen before, but not at that location, so he dropped me a line to share what he’d noticed.

It turns out that a similar but larger fountain built out of large, rough stones once sat in Riverside Park on West High Street.

Scott remembers seeing it at least in the 1960s, if not later. At some point the old fountain was replaced with a smaller, less distinctive small-stone pyramid fountain, which I was able to find in a Google Maps image.

This smaller fountain on East Gambier Street looks like it may have been made by the same maker as the fountain in Riverside Park. (Image courtesy of the History Knox Collection.)

That, in turn, was replaced by the current prefabricated Splash Pad structure.

And Scott knows a thing or two about fountains: “As an unrelated side note, I worked at United Precast on Roundhouse lane in Mount Vernon in the mid-1990s,” he wrote to me.

“We built the concrete fountain base that is currently on the Public Square. I was the straddle crane operator that loaded it on to a flatbed trailer.”

The two old fountains from the vintage postcards I was able to track down clearly suggest that they were both made by the same company.

It would be interesting to track down who that was, if anyone now knows. Were any other such fountains installed in the area? Were they later demolished, or do they survive somewhere?

Many thanks to Scott for citing the other fountain, and abetting the general upwelling of knowledge about Mount Vernon’s historical fountains.

Here is the smaller stone fountain which replaced the big old fountain, as seen in 2023. The smaller one was recently replaced with the Splash Pad play area. (Image source: Google Maps.)