Qualla: Andrews Geyser

Andrews Geyser: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dwalter5, CC BY 3.0. The water shoots eighty feet straight up out of the trees, and the trick is that nothing pumps it. No motor hums in the woods near Old Fort. No mechanism gives the column its lift. The pressure comes from physics alone: a pond five hundred feet upslope, a two-mile cast iron pipe running downhill through the laurel, and a half-inch nozzle pointed at the sky. Colonel Alexander Boyd Andrews of the Southern Railway helped engineer the climb that brought trains from the Piedmont up to Asheville. He never lived to see the version that stands here today, but the fountain that bears his name keeps doing what it was built to do in 1885 — catch the eye of anyone passing through the gap.

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Image: Dwalter5 | CC BY 3.0

Andrews Geyser: The Bodies in the Tunnels

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dwalter5, CC BY 3.0. 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 Swanna...

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Image: Dwalter5 | CC BY 3.0

Andrews Geyser: How Gravity Works When You Ask It Nicely

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dwalter5, CC BY 3.0. 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...

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Andrews Geyser: A Senior Class and a Novelist

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dwalter5, CC BY 3.0. 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 ...

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Image: Dwalter5 | CC BY 3.0

Andrews Geyser: What the Name Doesn't Say

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dwalter5, CC BY 3.0. 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 unc...

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Image: Dwalter5 | CC BY 3.0