Fuquay Mineral Spring is associated with the early development of the town of Fuquay-Varina and represents one of the varied types of health resorts that existed in North Carolina during the turn of the 20th century. The spring site is situated on land purchased by the Fuquay family between 1804 and 1852. Local tradition says the spring was discovered in the 1850s and people have “taken the waters” ever since. The spring site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986.
The mineral water at the spring flows out of a gazebo through a pipe and empties into a concrete basin on the edge of Neal’s Creek. The water flows freely, as it has for centuries. It is periodically tested for its purity and mineral content, and has continuously been available to passersby, without charge. But is the spring water actually safe to drink? And where does it come from? These are questions that have never been definitively answered. But it is possible to learn more about its potential origins and composition.
As the kids’ song entitled We All Live in a Watershed by Water Rocks! begins: “When it rains up here, it goes down there; that’s how it flows in a watershed!” This is true for the flow of water across land surfaces but also for groundwater which moves beneath the surface. Pollutants flow, too. When deposited or discharged upstream, they can impact water quality of both kinds and is why, as stated by the Conservation Trust for North Carolina: “Upstream matters to all of us.”
What is a watershed? It’s not all water like a pond or lake, but rather the land on which rain collects and runs to a single point. Think of it like a bathtub with its high rim (i.e., the highest points of land), its basin which can fill up with water, and the drain where water flows out. The whole tub makes up the watershed. In North Carolina, there are more than 1,700 watersheds.
Continuing with the tub metaphor, any water falling outside of the “rim” might flow into another watershed, towards a different low spot. Water flowing out of the “drain” (usually in the form of a creek or river) might enter another larger watershed area with a lower elevation or flow into a sound such as we have at the Outer Banks, or directly into the ocean.
The Town of Fuquay-Varina is situated in the middle of two watersheds—the Neuse River and Cape Fear River Basins. A green street sign in town informs drivers as to when they have left one and entered the other. The Neuse River watershed sits to the north and east, while the Cape Fear watershed is found to the south and west. The dividing line runs through the middle of town, near Smithwood Street off North Main Street. There used to be a road crossing at the rail corridor in this location and much of the rail line which runs through town follows the ridgelines that divide the watersheds.
The historic spring site in Fuquay-Varina is located on the Cape Fear watershed side of town. This watershed is NC’s largest, with over 9,000 square miles. Major tributaries include the Deep River, the Haw River, the Northeast Cape Fear River, the Black River, and the South River. These rivers converge to form a thirty-mile-long estuary before reaching the Atlantic Ocean near Southport. The basin has 21,300 miles of freshwater streams, 31,135 acres of freshwater lakes and reservoirs, 31,753 acres of estuarine habitat, and 47 miles of Atlantic coastline.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website states that the “Cape Fear basin is the only major river basin in North Carolina to empty directly into the Atlantic Ocean. This direct connection was and continues to be important today for the movement of local goods for shipment overseas. Early settlers in the basin moved natural resources downriver, where they were loaded onto ocean-going vessels.”
Many large cities are located within the Cape Fear River Basin, including Greensboro, High Point, Burlington, Durham, Fayetteville, and Wilmington. The basin contains multiple areas of heavy human population density, and the most populated areas are located in the Piedmont regions referred to as the Triad and the Triangle. According to the NC Division of Water Quality (2005), due to degraded waters and other factors, there are at least 35 species of greatest conservation need in the basin, including two aquatic snails, two crayfish, 18 freshwater or anadromous fishes, and 13 mussels.
Fuquay Springs, incorporated in 1909, joined with the neighboring community of Varina in 1963 as one municipality within NC’s capital county (Wake County). These two towns, which formed from earlier settlements, sit across the railroad from one another and across the two watersheds, as already mentioned. Fuquay-Varina is one of the fastest growing NC towns. First known as “Piney Woods,” Fuquay Springs acquired its unusual name from a French veteran of the Revolutionary War named William Fuquay, who moved his family to the area in 1805, as well as from the mineral spring that was discovered on his property around 1858.
An article about the town’s spring was published by WRAL on May 3, 2022. The article mentions that all kinds of people came to town, primarily by railway, to “take the waters” (meaning that they would drink or bathe in it) as a way to heal various physical ailments, and there were even annual celebrations at the spring site on Easter Monday and the Fourth of July. The railway, which had initially been built for the transport of timber, provided a means of transportation to the spring while hotels were built around the spring area and catered to long-term visitors.
The springs were walled in at some point to better serve the tourists. In 1860, Fuquay sold the springs to local investors who formed the “Chalybeate Springs Company” to market the attraction and its waters. The spring’s popularity grew in the 1890s and, according to Wikipedia, local businessman John Mills developed the idea to offer “Moonlight Excursions” to the springs around the start of the 20th century. He fitted flat rail cars with seats and offered nighttime train trips to southern Wake County from Raleigh.
Improvements to automobiles and area roads in the 1920s is thought to have caused a decline in tourism at the springs. Rather than visiting the springs, residents in the region were choosing to visit the coast as travel times decreased.
Through a series of complicated land transactions with the investors of the Chalybeate Springs Company, the property was purchased by W. H. Aiken in 1910 and 1915. Aiken played an important role in the development of the town during the early 20th century. He built the first tobacco warehouse in Fuquay Springs and served as mayor of the town in 1915. Aiken, along with his eldest son, W. H. Aiken, Jr., and another local businessman, Kemp B. Johnson, formed the Fuquay Mineral Springs Corporation, which developed the property and bottled and sold the water. Five gallon “demijohns” were shipped for $2 a container with a $1 rebate on the demijohn. Gallon jugs sold for 20¢ if shipped and 15¢ if purchased at the spring site.
There was a period of time in the 1930s when the spring ceased to operate. Richard Aiken inherited the property from his father in 1933 and planned to re-commercialize it. However, as it states on the www.livingplaces.com webpage for the Fuquay Springs Historic District, during dynamiting for sewage lines, the spring water ceased to flow, ending any chance of reviving the old tradition for a time (it later resumed its flow).
As mentioned on the 1986 National Register form, Mrs. Zazelle Johnson and her husband (who was by then deceased) purchased the property in 1943. Her husband was Woodrow Wilson Johnson, a former mayor of Fuquay-Varina. Over the years, the Johnsons tried to preserve the integrity of the site by maintaining the spring’s park-like setting, repairing the original gazebo, and providing public access to the mineral water. Decades later, they sold the site to the town, by which time the structures had deteriorated significantly.
The exact source of the Fuquay spring remains a mystery, since it comes from underground. Being “groundwater,” it is not known where and how the water quality might be affected by what takes place upstream. Few people are willing to say that the spring water is safe to drink in modern times, even though there are those who drink it and have attested to its beneficial properties. The spring water’s mineral attributes are better known, having been tested numerous times.
The spring, known as “ferruginous” waters, contains iron salts and is “chalybeate” in nature. (Another mystery that may not be solvable is how to pronounce that word, which is derived from the Latin word for steel, or chalybs). Springs like Fuquay’s produce hard water full of dissolved minerals. Salts, sulfur compounds, and gases are among the substances that can be dissolved in the spring water during their passage underground.
North Carolina has a rich geologic composition and an immense wealth of mineral resources. The state’s central geologic region, known as the Piedmont Plateau, runs from Alabama to New Jersey but is at its widest (150 miles) in North Carolina. This region is composed mainly of metamorphic and igneous rocks. Gneiss, schist, lithium, clay, sand, gravel, and building stone can be found throughout the piedmont, and gold was once mined in abundance.
As mentioned in the recent WRAL article, the spring was described as “bubbling up through a bed of solid rock,” and when tested, the water was shown to have compounds in it such as potassium chloride, sodium chloride, sodium bicarbonate, magnesium bicarbonate, magnesium sulphate, calcium bicarbonate, calcium sulphate, calcium silicate, iron and aluminum oxides and silica. Such a wealth of minerals may have helped people find relief from some ailments, as was noted in the article by Shirley Simmons, Volunteer Director of Fuquay-Varina Museums.
Even though the mineral springs were important to the history of the town, the spring site was completely overgrown and almost forgotten at one point. It was sold to the town in 2010, along with the former Johnson House next to it, for $429,000 and was transformed into a public park. The house was built in the 1940s and was home to the previous owners of the spring. Today, the restored house provides office space to some town staff.
The springhouse’s mineral waters still bubble up from some mysterious place below. As it states on the Town’s website: “Fuquay Mineral Spring Park offers an easily accessible open space with a restored springhouse, memorial brick path, picnic tables, footbridge, administrative offices, and finely manicured landscaping.” It is a peaceful place to take a walk, have a picnic, listen to the babbling creek and wildlife, and maybe partake of the waters.
One wonders what sort of hydrologic journey this water has taken below ground and what it might have picked up and carried along with it as it traveled to the surface, including minerals but also potential pollutants from sources located upstream. Flowing out of the springhouse pipe, unsampled water rich in minerals is generally left alone to make its way into Neal’s Creek, then continue on to join the Cape Fear River near Lillington.
The next time you notice the signs in town informing you that you have passed from one watershed into another, ponder what you now know about the flow of water through our area. Consider this: The mineral water at the spring still flows freely and continues to be available to the public, without charge, just as it has been since the spring’s discovery. Given the opportunity, would you drink it?
