Lawrence County's town well logs run deep, with median depths from 115 feet around New Wilmington to 165 around Ellport. Yet around Ellport and Ellwood City, the logs reach bedrock at a median of just 16 feet.
Medians from 115 to 165 feet
The deepest town medians in the logs are around Ellport (165 feet), Ellwood City (160) and Bessemer (150), then Wampum (140), New Beaver (135) and New Castle (134). Enon Valley (120), Volant (119) and New Wilmington (115) are the shallowest. The USGS county record is a separate, smaller set, 171 wells with a median of 88 feet and a middle half of 66 to 114, so the town logs, 579 to 973 around each town, carry more of the picture.
Median yields are 10 gallons a minute around Ellport and Ellwood City, 12 to 18 around Bessemer, Enon Valley, New Beaver, New Castle and Wampum, and 20 around New Wilmington and Volant. On a deep well the submersible pump is set for the depth, and depth is one of the things the cost page explains.
Pottsville rock at six town centers
The Pottsville Formation is mapped at six of the nine town centers: Ellport, Ellwood City, New Castle, New Wilmington, Volant and Wampum. The Allegheny Formation is mapped at Bessemer and Enon Valley, and the Glenshaw Formation at New Beaver.
The same mapped unit doesn't mean the same ground above it. Ellport and New Castle are both Pottsville centers, yet the logs reach bedrock at a median 16 feet around Ellport and 36 around New Castle. Ellwood City matches Ellport at 16, Wampum sits at 22 and New Wilmington at 24, while Enon Valley and Volant are at 32, Bessemer at 31 and New Beaver at 28. For one property, a well inspection on an older well, or the nearest logs before a new well, says more than the map.
Two river systems and three well boroughs
Seven of the nine towns sit inside a public system on EPA's map. On our Lawrence County map, Pennsylvania American Water runs two surface-water systems. New Castle's, on the Shenango River, serves 43,279 people, and Ellwood City's draws on the Connoquenessing and the Beaver River for 17,200, Ellport included. New Wilmington Borough buys its water from Aqua PA's Shenango Valley plant. Bessemer, Volant and Wampum pump groundwater from two active wells each.
Enon Valley and New Beaver have no system on that map, which doesn't mean no home there is connected; a home on a public line gets its report from the utility. The Lawrence County treatment page covers what these systems do to the water, and what the county's USGS samples say about the wells around them.
Source: Water quality: USGS National Water Information System results for Lawrence County wells, served through the Water Quality Portal, sampled between 1928 and 2023, retrieved 2026-09-14. Each well counts once, as the median of its samples. The 0.3 mg/L iron and 0.05 mg/L manganese marks are EPA secondary standards, which are aesthetic limits, not health limits. Well depth: USGS groundwater site inventory for Lawrence County, 171 wells with a recorded depth, retrieved 2026-09-14.
