DECATUR - At 81 years old, Joseph Doyle doesn't believe he's going to find the Fountain of Youth.

But he'd settle for finding one of the ornate Victorian creations that used to be stationed outside the Transfer House in Decatur. Perhaps made of cast iron or even bronze and with an embossed, decorated roof that arched over them like mini-Transfer Houses, the maybe 6-foot-tall drinking fountains were something to see.

Three of them were put in around the Transfer House when it opened in its former Lincoln Square location in 1895 as a transfer point for trolley passengers. A fourth fountain was stationed on the edge of what became Central Park to combat the ravages of downtown thirst. Each one had its own well in the dark ages before water was piped through mains and passers-by served themselves with a tin cup.

Doyle has come to admire the fountains the way people admire magnificent buildings constructed as much to impress as to accommodate. Built with decoration way over the top for their purpose, the fountains date from an age where expense was a detail on the way to flowing visual exuberance.

"They would not build something like that now," says Doyle. "These fountains were a marvelous piece of work, like something you might see in a church. They were spectacular, really, and I would give anything to find one."

A retired sheet metal worker, he's always had a fascination for good design. He once dreamed of fabricating metal birdfeeders that looked like the Transfer House and, in studying historic pictures to come up with some drawings, first noticed those peculiar fountains. The more photographs he peered at, the more it whetted his appetite to plumb their history.

He's since accumulated a thick folder of pictures but not too much information. He knows the fountains arrived with the Transfer House and surmises they had evaporated by circa 1914. As Europe plunged into the abyss of World War I, then-Decatur Mayor Dan Dinneen had the city splash $1,200 on seven new fountains where water sprang forth at the twist of a tap.

The press dubbed them the "Mayor's Bubblers" and gushed with praise. Here's the Decatur Herald from August 3, 1914: "Mayor Dan Dinneen will have to study a good while to think of something that will prove more popular than the bubbling drinking fountains he has installed in various parts of the city."

Made of enameled white metal sitting on a pedestal with two fountain taps and an extra curved spout for filling bottles, the new devices looked like errant sinks on vacation from the bathroom; hardly a design triumph. Doyle notes them in passing in his continuing quest for the curved and roofed beauties they replaced. He fears the original city fountains' fate wasn't pretty.

"Probably scrapped, melted down," he says, smiling bravely. "They would have reused the metal for something."

The fact that the fountains probably were flushed into oblivion wouldn't surprise historical experts such as Patrick McDaniel, executive director of the Macon County History Museum and Prairie Village.

He says Decatur's track record for preserving the glories of the past isn't encouraging: "We are one of the few communities in the United States to tear down a Carnegie Library," he said, spitting out the words like he had a bad taste in his mouth. "They tore it down so they could build a parking lot."

McDaniel says at one time, it was even touch and go whether the Transfer House itself - a building he describes as "unique in the entire world" - would join them. "Half of Decatur wanted to tear it down, too," he adds. "They didn't care."

And yet just like President Obama's belief in the audacity of hope, McDaniel says that some capricious act of official oversight may have spared at least one of the fountains, which could now be anywhere. But if it is ever found, Doyle cuts in with a timely health warning: better to keep it as a pretty icon to look at rather than a working decorative fragment of Decatur's glory days.

He points out that a communal watering hole tapped into a well with shared drinking cups would not be the recipe for a fountain of youth. "You took your chances back in 1896," he explains. "And people didn't live as long then as we do now."

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