Mount Hill fountain is fed from a natural spring on the side of Mount Hill, near Monklands Court, Halstead.
Neither Essex County and Braintree District council owns it and no further information has been discovered.
Halstead’s history links the fountain to an outbreak of typhoid in 1896, in which pipes carrying drinking water to the fountain were found to be letting in sewage from the town’s isolation hospital pipes. The connection was only discovered after several children, and a man whose house was served by the same water source, came down with the fever.