Floyd Lee Brown Jr. remembers when the freshwater Fonticello Spring in Richmond’s Southside was the neighborhood watering hole.
“For the community, it was a meeting place,” says Brown, who most people call “Coach” because of his many years spent teaching kids the finer points of basketball, football and baseball at Fonticello Park.
Saturdays were the busiest at the fountain, with neighbors fetching water and swapping stories as their children ran around.
“Especially in the summertime, we’d be out there playing, having a good time,” recalls the 59-year-old maintenance worker of his youthful pursuits in the park. “It was a cooling spot. We’d go down there, get some water, get revived, and continue to play all day. The water revived us, it was so pure and fresh.”

If Brown had his way, this spring would serve as a community hub once more. Over the years, Fonticello and other springs in Richmond have been closed to the public out of safety concerns.
But after the city’s water treatment plant failed earlier this month — a debacle that left thousands without water for days — an effort to reopen the city’s springs is gaining traction. Last week, Richmonder Laney Sullivan launched an online petition that asks new Mayor Danny Avula and City Council to reopen the springs for non-potable use. As of Thursday morning, the petition had more than 1,800 signatures.
With the city’s aging water system in desperate need of repairs — a 2022 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report found it to be “crumbling, broken down and filthy” in WRIC-8’s summation — Sullivan and Brown say Richmond should give the public access to the springs in case something like this happens again.

“What we are asking is that the city just allow the waters to flow freely and to the public,” says Sullivan, a member of environmentally focused indie-folk group Holy River who lives across the street from the Fonticello Spring. “At Fonticello, [the spring is] behind a locked door and you can hear it flowing into the drain.”
On Thursday, the Virginia Department of Health’s Office of Drinking Water sent the city a notice of an alleged violation, saying that “the crisis never should have happened and was completely avoidable.”
At a time when faith in Richmond’s infrastructure is at an all-time low, could reopening the city’s freshwater springs help ease the city’s water woes?
Once upon a time, Richmond had an abundance of freshwater springs.
“The number of springs that discharged their cool waters into the streets and squares of old Richmond was extraordinary,” reads Virginius Dabney’s authoritative “Richmond: The Story of a City.” Samuel Mordecai, the scion of a prominent Jewish family, wrote in 1856 that the springs of his youth “flowed from various spots at the base of Shockoe Hill, along its whole extent from Fifth to Fourteenth Street … There was a spring on almost every square west of the Capitol.”
Though a definitive count is hard to come by, there were more than a dozen springs utilized by the public at one point or another. The last two that saw prominent use by citizens for potable purposes were Fonticello and Wayside springs.
Fonticello, the spring of Brown’s youth, once provided water for the area’s Indigenous population. In 1872, William Garland Taylor purchased a 40-acre estate in Chesterfield County named Fonticello that included numerous springs. Taylor bottled and sold this spring water under the name Fonticello Lithia Springs Company. This land was later subdivided into lots and sold; the 11 acres that included the largest spring remained undeveloped for use as a park. That land was annexed by Richmond in 1924 and became what is now Fonticello Park.
Located off New Kent Road in Westover Hills, Wayside Spring is still gurgling away; a plaque on a stone wall at the spring reads “Westover Hills Garden Club, 1939” — evidence that enjoyment of the springs wasn’t limited to environmentalist-types.

Other historic springs include Buttermilk, Byrd Park, Chimborazo Park, City, Clark, Fifth Avenue, Libby Hill, Masonic Lane, Moore Street, Riverview Cemetery and Terrace.
But the city’s coolest spring is located underneath the Byrd Theatre. Below Richmond’s 1928 movie palace is a spring that can be accessed through the basement. In a 2017 segment for WTVR-6, reporter Mark Holmberg visited the spring. The water stands roughly 4-feet-deep in a 25-foot-by-25-foot room.
For generations, Richmonders filled containers at freshwater springs and took them home to drink, preferring the sweet spring agua to that of the city’s treated H2O. But news clippings from the Richmond Times-Dispatch and Richmond News Leader, the city’s now-defunct afternoon paper, detail a series of spring closings and re-openings that took place over the past century. E. coli and other contaminants were often cited as reasons for the closures, including Byrd Park Spring’s permanent closure in 1981.
As for when and why some of the city’s other springs were closed for good, details are hard to nail down.
A 2008 RTD article states that even though the city put up signs at the springs reading “Spring Water Not Safe for Drinking,” “the water might be perfectly safe. The city said yesterday that it is no longer testing the water because of budget constraints, so it figured the prudent course was to post signs saying that the water is unsafe.”

Asked why most of the city’s springs were closed, Tamara E. Jenkins, spokesperson for the Department of Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities, says the closings predates her time with the city and that there are no cost estimates for reopening the springs.
Dwayne Roadcap, director of VDH’s Office of Drinking Water, believes that Richmond chose to stop using the springs for potable purposes in the early 1980s because of samples that tested positive for total coliform, a group of related bacteria. While total coliforms aren’t usually harmful to humans, the Environmental Protection Agency considers them a useful indicator of other pathogens in a water supply that could cause gastrointestinal illnesses.
Reopening the springs for drinking purposes would mean the city would have to request a permit from VDH, submit an application for work from a licensed professional engineer to ensure the protection of the springs’ housing and structure, and ensure that the springs are monitored to protect against people who might harm the drinking water.
“Most likely, the spring could only be approved with continuous disinfection, appropriate operation and maintenance, routine sampling, and appropriate monitoring against natural and man-made hazards,” states Roadcap by email.
Reopening the springs for non-potable purposes would not be regulated by VDH, Roadcap writes, but local building code could have requirements about the use of non-potable water for building permits.
The latter is what Sullivan is requesting with her petition. Not only could the springs serve as a source of water in case the city’s treatment plant fails again (on Wednesday, the city announced that Arlington-based engineering consulting and infrastructure design firm HNTB had been selected to investigate the city’s water crisis), but Fonticello Spring could be used to irrigate the Fonticello Food Forest, a community garden Sullivan co-founded in its namesake park to provide food to anyone who needs it.
“We’re just asking that the city stop withholding this resource from us and diverting it into the sewer and wasting it,” Sullivan says. “It’s such a short window of time that they’ve been closed to people.”
At least one member of City Council supports reopening the springs.
“The recent water crisis revived a longstanding community conversation about a unique and treasured historic asset — our natural springs,” writes Councilmember Stephanie Lynch via email. “While there is some design elements and costs to work through, I believe now is as good a time as any to bring these beautiful elements back to life for the benefit of our neighbors and visitors.”

Though Christopher F. Meindl is fascinated by freshwater springs, he warns that they are subject to the same potential issues of any other natural water source.
“Historically, that water was a pretty clean and valuable resource,” explains Meindl, an associate professor of geography at the University of South Florida and author of the book “Florida Springs” about the Sunshine State’s freshwater wonders.
Generally, springs are created when groundwater flows downhill and creates such significant pressure that it pushes through the surface at a lower point.
For thousands of years, humans have ascribed medicinal and magical properties to springs; up until about a century ago, “taking in” the waters through drinking or bathing was endorsed by the scientific community as a way to treat a variety of ailments. Those beliefs began to fade around the 1920s as medicine began to modernize, Meindl says.
Though spring water may be perfectly safe, leaky sewage pipes, fertilizer runoff and other contaminants can leech into it. Even if spring water looks, smells and tastes fine, it can still make someone sick if they consume it.
And water that may be fine to drink one day could be contaminated the next. Though simple water tests performed by laypeople might show clean results, Meindl says testing for things like bacteria and excess nitrogen are more involved and expensive, especially when conducted regularly enough to ensure water quality day after day.
Meindl can see why city officials might be leery of opening freshwater springs to the public.
“I can imagine public authorities thinking ‘We don’t want to be the next Flint, Michigan,’” Meindl says. “‘We don’t want to be the ones who have to answer questions about why we let people access contaminated water.’”

Richmond’s connection to freshwater springs can even be found on Capitol Square.
Down the hill from Thomas Jefferson’s Capitol are a pair of fountains that are, when running, fed by freshwater springs.
And the public entrance facing Bank Street at the bottom of the hill? Based on the Doric-columned entrance to Temperance Spring in Fluvanna County. The entrance was added as part of a Capitol Square overhaul that opened to the public in 2007. Luckily for politicos who enjoy a tipple, having a General Assembly entrance modeled after a monument to temperance has done little to stifle the boozy Thursday Caucus.
As for the watering hole he grew up drinking from, Brown says reviving Fonticello Spring would restore a community resource, even if the water is non-potable.
“It would be a blessing for the neighborhood,” says Brown. “I’d like to see them open it back up, and if that’s the case about drinking it, put a sign up there.”