Courthouse Square Star-shaped Fountain - Glen Rose Downtown Historic District - Glen Rose, TX - NRHP Historic Districts - Contributing Buildings on Waymarking.com

The five-pointed-star shaped concrete and stone fountain on the grounds of the Somervell County Courthouse is a successor in function to the animal-watering troughs securing water from public wells on the square that preceded it. The Bungalow/Craftsman style concrete structure, faced on the exterior with locally occurring petrified wood, fossils, and decorative stone, measures 2 feet 10 inches tall and averages 7 feet 6 inches across from point to point. There is a central pipe through which water under pressure gently squirts upward into the air, while five individual drinking bubblers are located near the tip of each point in the star. As originally constructed, the fountain had smooth-surfaced concrete panels on its top. In later renovation the smooth concrete top to the fountain was replaced with additional petrified wood laid in concrete.

At least by the 1890s the commissioners of Somervell County had an artesian well drilled on the grounds of the courthouse in order to provide water to the local residents and their animals. This well provided natural artesian flow to a rectangular stone trough on the southeast side of the square. By the second decade of the twentieth century, flow from the initial public well had diminished and needs for its repair prompted the county commissioners in 1914 to have a new public well drilled. The replacement of horses and mules for transportation by automobiles decreased the need for a public trough. Consequently about 1935, in anticipation of the celebration of the centennial of Texas independence, local people in Glen Rose decided to mark the event by replacing the old stone horse trough with a new public drinking fountain in the shape of a five-pointed Texas Star. They erected the structure, complete with exterior ornamentation of locally occurring petrified wood, and made it part of their commemoration of Texas independence. Both Glen Rose residents and out-of-town visitors drank and filled jugs with its sulphur-smelling mineral water. As local boosters began promoting the creation of what eventually became Dinosaur Valley State Park, in 1959 they erected above the fountain an inverted-U shaped welded steel pipe support for a cutout steel sheet dinosaur painted by a young local artist named Robert Summers, whose father was county judge at the time. The structure supported a sign that detailed the mineral content of the water in the fountain below. The steel framework and cutout survived for just over twenty-five years, eventually being cut down and removed to be replaced with an equally short-lived flag pole mounted at the center of the fountain. Eventually the flow of mineralized waters diminished, the 1914 well was capped, and the fountain for a while was supplied with water from the municipal system. Then in the 1990s the well was re-drilled in order to furnish the fountain with water. It continues to the present day as a public drinking fountain.

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Gene Fowler's "Glen Rose", in Arcadia's Images of America series, has a photo of the fountain with the aforementioned steel cutout in place. He was a Trachodon named Tex.