Before the geyser, there was the railroad, and before the railroad, there were the men who died building it. Roughly 120 workers lost their lives carving the line between Old Fort and Asheville in the late 1870s and 1880s, blasting through the Eastern Continental Divide at Swannanoa Tunnel and threading six tunnels across seven and a half miles of relentless grade. Many of them were convict laborers, mostly Black men leased from North Carolina prisons under a system that treated their lives as expendable. Andrews Geyser was conceived as ornament for the Round Knob Hotel, where wealthy passengers paused to admire the mountains. It was also explicitly a memorial. Old Fort has more recently raised a separate monument acknowledging the enslaved and incarcerated workers by name. The geyser is the older marker, and one that has always meant two things at once.

The original Round Knob Hotel burned to the ground in 1903, and the fountain it adorned fell into ruin. In 1911, the New York financier George Fisher Baker — a friend of Andrews and one of the era's quieter Gilded Age titans — paid for a restoration. The railroad refused to renew the easement on the old location, so workers moved the basin seventy yards across Mill Creek and rebuilt it with five sides. The water still comes from a small dam on the Long Branch of Mill Creek, now part of the Inn on Mill Creek property uphill. A six-inch cast iron pipe carries that water under the forest floor for nearly two miles. By the time it reaches the half-inch nozzle, the five-hundred-foot drop has converted gravity into a column of water tall enough to scrape the canopy. When summer droughts dry the supply pond, the fountain rests.

The geyser nearly disappeared again in the mid-twentieth century. By the late 1960s it was choked with debris and forgotten by all but locals. The Old Fort High School Senior Class of 1971 cleaned the basin and the grounds, and the town rededicated the fountain on May 6, 1976. A few years earlier, in 1967, the North Carolina novelist John Ehle had published The Road, a historical novel about the railroad's construction. His fictional engineer ends the book gazing at the geyser, the spray standing in for everything the line had cost and everything it had achieved. The fountain endures partly because writers, students, and Old Fort residents kept finding reasons to care about it.

Despite the name, it is not a geyser. Geysers are geothermal, driven by superheated water flashing to steam underground. This is a fountain — a beautiful piece of nineteenth-century hydraulic engineering dressed up as a natural wonder. The misnomer stuck because the effect is uncanny: a perfectly vertical jet of cold mountain water erupting from a granite basin in the middle of nowhere, with no visible apparatus. Most fountains require energy. This one only requires geography, and the patience of a railroad colonel who understood both.