Huff’s Spring, Rocklin, CA 95677

This spring is at the north end of Johnson Springview Park, 200 yards east of the Springview Middle School soccer field. You can access the spring from Fifth Street via the footpath at the north side of the Wickman-Johnson home. The spring was a widely known Rocklin curiosity and source of clean drinking water in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A nearly cluster of 88 bedrock mortars and about 4 acres of gently sloping terrain, partly covered by Springview Middle School’s soccer field, tell that the area was formerly home to a large community of native Nisenan. According to archeologists Norm Wilson and Arlean Towne, the rising slope at the west side of the bedrock mortars, called a “midden”, covers the refuse of more than 1500 years of Nisesan seasonal encampments.
It’s called Huff’s Mineral Spring, named after William Huff who lined it with granite blocks in 1887 and sold the water – 25 cents for all a person could carry. Huff’s spring gurgles 120 gallons per minute of chilly water over its granite lining into a tributary of Antelope Creek. Mysteriously, the flow slows noticeably at midday but is strong again by early evening. Rocklin Hydrologist Christian Carleton, who lives nearby, attributes this to deep-rooted oaks which take up water from the underlying aquifer while the sun is high. The water is alkaline and not suitable for irrigation. But it is cool and clean and early Rocklin settlers relied on it to augment the stream and lake water that the railroad companies brought down from Blue Canyon in tank cars.