Restore the College Spring!

The College Spring has suffered from neglect for many years, but recent events have endangered its existence. If you care about the spring, let the folks in Montgomery Hall know why it is important to you.
In the years before the founding of New Concord, when the area was nothing more than a small gathering of farms known as the Findlay settlement, the natural spring served as a source of fresh water for residents. It continued to be used that way for much of the 19th century.
The Muskingum College Class of 1914 paid for the construction of the plaza and walls, including a high-spraying fountain at the center of the plaza. In the many years before the development of the quad, the College Spring was an important meeting place for the campus community. Poetry and dramatic readings were regularly scheduled there.

In the early 1920s, when the College recent a visit from President Warren G. Harding, the College Spring was the site of the ceremony in which the college bestowed upon him an honorary doctorate.

After the development of the Quad, the Spring was no longer a focal point for the College, but remained a place where faculty could teach a class on a nice day, and in the evening a quiet place to which young couples might go to escape the campus hub-bub.
In recent decades, the Spring has been neglected and forgotten. Some geologic forces shifting in the hillside have slowed stream of water. The old walls of the plaza began to press inward and crack under the weight of the slowly shifting hill. The fountain was dismantled and filled in with muck and mud years ago. The concrete floor of the plaza is cracked and uneven, and the overflow trickle from the spring pond runs across the concrete. It has been dying a slow, creeping death.

The Spring remains, however, one of the best places in town to catch frogs and tadpoles.

In recent years, many students have been unaware of the College Spring's existence. But those who have discovered it appreciate its space, and want to restore it. In the last five or six years, students groups have gone down to the spring periodically to clean it up and to plant flowers.
Recent events--which I confess I don't completely understand--have put the Spring in jeopardy. Some kind of underground obstruction has blocked the flow of water, creating a sinkhole on the hill above, and causing te ground to shift even more, pressing down on the already compromised brick walls.

The College Physical plant has taken some emergency actions to stop the collapse. They have torn up the hedges that lined the wall, and filled in the sinkholes (and the original fountain pool) with large rocks. But the Spring, as you can see, looks absolutely horrible. And it is unclear as to whether these stopgap measures will succeed in keeping the hillside from collapsing into the Spring.

What appears to be needed is a plan for stabilizing the hillside, and then a complete reconstruction of the plaza and walls. Hopefully, the "Class of 1914" keystone can be saved and placed in the new walls.

The challenge of course, is how to find money to do this when the College has many other important and expensive building projects going on. If you care about the Spring, and have some consructive ideas about how to save it, let me know. It would be ashame to see this quiet retreat--and important part of the College's history--disappear.