At the corner of 8th Avenue and 8th Street in Belle Plaine, there’s a boulder with a bronze plaque put there in 1954 to commemorate “Jumbo,” a well-turned-geyser that briefly made the Benton County city famous almost 70 years earlier.
By the time the well that became Jumbo was dug, the Belle Plaine area already had a reputation for easy access to artesian wells, which are wells where the water is under enough pressure that it rises to the surface without pumping. Normally, that’s a good thing, but when the contractor the city hired to dig a well on its south side hit water at a depth of 195 feet on Aug. 26, 1886, it proved to be too much of a good thing.
The water shot up uncontrollably, pouring out at an estimated 3,000 gallons per minute, and started to flood the south side of Belle Plaine. A ditch that was dug to divert the water to the Iowa River quickly became clogged, because the water was bringing sand — tons of it, eventually — rocks and even petrified wood. After an unsuccessful attempt to control the gusher, the contractor skipped town.
Jumbo quickly became a tourist attraction, and enterprising locals bottled some of the water in the ditch to sell to those who came to gawk. A series of unsuccessful attempts to control the well followed. One contractor did find success, not in stemming the flow of water, but by charging tourists admission to see the well after he built a tall wooden fence around it. It wouldn’t be until October 1887, 14 months after the water started flowing, that the well was brought under control.
Even today, almost 140 years after Jumbo was subdued, memory of the well lives on in Belle Plaine. “It is probably the iconic event for the town,” according to a Belle Plaine Historical Society video about Jumbo.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s July 2025 issue
