Formerly an upright circle, the badly twisted tin wall looking like it was smashed by a tree or crushed by one of the cars slowly crumbling nearby. On the surface, at least, it's nothing special, scarcely worth a second glance.

A closer examination, however, unveils something truly special, something unique. Something that lies far below the surface.

The tin protects the entrance to the Purrysburg "jug well," something seemingly everyone in Jasper County has heard of, but no one can quite define.

The brick-lined well is shaped like a huge jug, buried up to its neck in sandy soil perhaps 100 yards from the Savannah River. A flashlight reveals gray and red brick walls standing 20 or so feet from the floor to the top of the underground "jug," with more bricks lining its ceiling as it stretches toward its tin mouth.

The bottom is lined in rubble, mostly long-dead trees. No water remains, if there was ever water there. Nothing is identifiable: No dates, no names, nothing.

It seems to be just a well, if a big one. But it's one of Jasper County's most enduring historical mysteries.

"All I know about it is it's there," said Hardeeville's Louis Davis, peering into the well on Friday. "What its purpose was, I have no idea."

He's not alone. Seemingly no matter which historian one asks, the answer's always the same.

"Nobody seems to know what it was," says Norris Dean, who ran the Webel Museum in Ridgeland for the Jasper County Historical Society for years. "If anybody does know, they haven't told us."

"It's kind of a curiosity," says Ridgeland historian Freddie Nimmer. "Nobody knows a whole lot about it."

"I never heard my mother talk about it and she knew everything. Nobody knows who put it in. Nobody knows who dug it," said Blufftonian Dick McTeer, whose Greenville cousins own the site.

Even the archaeologists who put together "An Archaeological and Historical Survey of Jasper County, South Carolina" in 1996 didn't know. The well's history was left blank, one of very few handled that way by the book's authors.

If nobody knows for certain where it came from or what it is, however, everyone seems to have heard a rumor or two.

Davis smiles as he repeats rumors that it was used to store food, or as a tiny prison for Confederate soldiers when Sherman's army came through in 1865. Or maybe it was a prison used by Confederate soldiers for other unruly Confederate soldiers; the area was heavily used as a camp by Rebels.

Or maybe it was just a well, but its proximity to the freshwater Savannah River seems to belie that.

Rita Livingston, a College of Charleston history professor and Jasper County native, has never seen it, but thinks it was probably a cistern of some sort. It could have been a storage area, on the other hand, if it stays dry and cool year round.

The well has attracted visitors like Davis for decades. At one point, the 82-year-old Davis said, there was a ladder leading to the well's bottom, but it has long-since disappeared. Davis said he never climbed down it.

"Why not? Man, there could be snakes and things down there," Davis said.

There are rumors that more than one such well exists near Purrysburg, but Davis has never seen a second. Dean said he's heard of similar wells on Hilton Head Island, but he's can't confirm that, either.

Years ago, the Hardeeville Chamber of Commerce tried to convince the well's owners to open the land as a tourist attraction, Davis said, but the owner balked and the idea died.

"It's just deteriorating more and more," Davis said. "It should be preserved. Somebody should know what it is. Somewhere in the history books, there ought to be some record of it."

But, for now, there doesn't seem to be. It's just a well, its mouth slowly closing, its history fading as quickly as it is.