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The Elkhart Wells are one mile southeast of the town of Elkhart, in Anderson County. They vary from thirty to sixty feet in depth, and have been sunk for the sake of the mineral waters they contain. A hotel is being built here and a health resort started. Some of the waters are comparatively free from mineral matter, while others are strongly impregnated with iron, alum and sulphur. Some of the old wells here are said to have smelled so strongly of sulphur as to have been obnoxious, and were filled up. The surrounding country is flat, low, and underlaid by sand and clay. These are brown from the presence of vegetable matter, and contain iron pyrites, lime, gypsum, and sulphur. It is doubtless from the mutual decomposition of these materials that the mineral matter in the water owes its origin. Some of the waters have a strong sulphur taste, and others have the pungent effects of alum and iron salts.
In the northeast part of the Musquez survey, in Mud Creek bottom, Cherokee County, are a great number of ferruginous and sulphur springs. The sulphur gives a strong taste to the water, and is deposited as a white sediment. The iron springs deposit a heavy sediment of hydrous oxide, and are closely associated with the sulphur springs. Twelve springs like these were seen in an area of about one square mile. In one of them a section of a large hollow gum tree has been sunk, making a beautiful clear basin within the sides of the trunk. Tradition says that General Rusk, almost fifty years ago, placed this tree here, and used to come every year from his home in Nacogdoches County to drink the water. Many other such springs are found in Eastern Texas, and many are the stories of wonderful cures that have been worked by them, but they have not yet been examined by the writer.
OILS.
The subject of oils in Nacogdoches, Angelina, and other counties has not been studied, and is left for future discussion. The oils and asphalt-bearing sands of Anderson County are briefly described below.
Ten miles east of Palestine is seen a series of black and chocolate colored sands lying horizontally and containing specks of mica. They are impregnated with bituminous matter, sometimes in the form of stiff sticky asphalt, and at others as mineral oil. In this neighborhood six wells were bored for oil by a Palestine syndicate in 1887, but little or no oil was found. The following two sections of borings, from data collected by Mr. J. L. Mayo, contractor, show the associations of the oil-bearing strata: