In Search of Indian Spring

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

In 1973, the Indian Springs Water Company had already been a going concern in Rockaway township for many years. It delivered hundreds of five-gallon bottles of pure spring all over Northern New Jersey each day. Customers ranged from Doc Severinsen (Johnny Carson’s band leader), who lived in Sussex County, to the N.J. Statehouse in Trenton. The company was owned and operated by Joe Oram, a cantankerous yet likable old man. His spring and bottling plant was in a quiet, wooded ravine on the edge of White Meadow Lake, a residential community. His ancestors were among the founders of Morris County. Joe told me that the spring had been in his family for many generations.

A small spring house with a cobblestone floor covered the vent where water sprung from the ground. A layer of sand was spread over the floor to filter the water before it was pumped into a stainless-steel holding tank. The sand was periodically replaced. Spring water was pumped from the tank into the spring house during operations. The only other water treatment was from an ultraviolet filter near the spigot filling the bottles. It was pure, clean, and delicious water that was regularly tested to meet state regulations.

The bottling operation took place on weekdays in a modest cement-block bottling house. Three or four delivery drivers would unload wooden crates containing empty bottles from their trucks and stack the crates on one side of the loading dock. Next, they reloaded the trucks with full crates of water stacked on the other side of the dock before heading out to make their deliveries. A bottle washer carried all the empty bottles into the wash area and ran them through a bottle washing machine. The bottles were temporarily stored along the back wall if the bottle washer was working alone. When all the bottles were cleaned, he carried them to the other side of the bottling house where they were refilled and capped. The filled bottles were then carefully slipped back into wooden crates and stacked on the loading dock.

Production was modest. The bottle washing machine could only clean about 84 bottles per hour. With only one employee in the bottling house, only about 350 bottles could be filled in an eight-hour shift. Sometimes that was enough. 

The brains of this operation appeared to work part-time in a mobile office trailer beside the spring house. It was equipped with a desk, two chairs, a telephone, an old typewriter, filing cabinets, and lots of handwritten invoices and office supplies scattered about. The back half of the trailer was crammed with water coolers in various states and conditions. Joe Oram seemed to know the names and addresses of most of his customers by memory. This was a small, simple, but profitable business. By lunchtime, Joe was off to his favorite restaurant, The Three Sisters, for drinks and a meal. 

I worked for Joe in the summer of 1973 delivering spring water all over Northern N.J. I switched in the fall to be his bottle washer while attending college part-time. I helped a friend of mine get the delivery job I gave up. He eventually went into the spring water business himself and comfortably retired at an early age. Joe eventually sold Indian Spring. By then, the spring water business was changing due to mergers and acquisitions. One very large spring operation in Pennsylvania was able to sell bottled water wholesale to other companies at a cost that was less than some bottling operations. 

The fate of the actual Indian Spring was not so happy. Water tests some years later showed that the spring was becoming polluted from groundwater contamination migrating from Picatinny Arsenal, a U.S. Army Armament Research facility. By that time, the Indian Spring Water Company had other water sources, including the wholesale purchase of water from the plant in Pennsylvania. But, the Indian Springs plant was abandoned. The land was eventually sold to a developer.

That was fifty years ago. Recently I went looking for Indian Spring to see if it was still flowing. Hardly anyone I talked to about the spring (local residents, town road crew members, etc.) remembered it or the bottling company for whom I worked. It isn’t referenced in Google searches, doesn’t appear on Google Earth images, or appears in the NJDEP’s GeoWeb maps.

My first attempt to find the spring was not successful. I drove around, but nothing looked familiar. On my second attempt, however, I found it. It is hidden from view in a gully behind a townhouse in a development aptly named Indian Springs. 

Just a short way downstream from the vent, I watched it's water cascade over a low, moss-covered rock wall someone had built long ago. The sound of it was musical. I felt at peace knowing that despite the radical changes and damage we inflict on the natural world, this little spring just keeps flowing.