Lincoln County: what we tell well owners in Troy, Winfield and Silex

Lincoln County is the hardest county we serve, and it isn't close. My son Austin and I get the same phone call from up there over and over: somebody on a private well outside Troy or Winfield or Silex has finally gotten tired of orange stains and dead water heaters, and they want to know what they're actually dealing with. So this is the conversation we have, written down. Every town number in it comes out of our own data, and the well guidance comes out of the well notes we keep on this county specifically.

How this table was built: This pulls all 8 Lincoln County, Missouri towns in Jones Air & Water's own 57-town water dataset, built from utility consumer confidence reports, DNR and EPA well data, and our own in-home testing, pulled in 2026. Towns are sorted by public-system hardness in grains per gallon (gpg), high to low. These are the town numbers. A private well next door to any of them is a separate question, which is most of what this post is about.

Seven out of eight towns grade F

Elsberry is the only town in this county that isn't an F, and at 13.0 gpg it's still solidly in "very hard" territory. Averaged straight across all eight town numbers, not weighted by population, Lincoln County comes out to about 17.2 gpg. For comparison, the same straight average across the 14 St. Charles County towns in our dataset is roughly 10.8 gpg. That gap is not a rounding difference. It's the difference between a county that blends in treated river water and a county sitting on deep limestone.

In the cost bands we use, seven of these eight towns land in the F band we price at about $1,150 a year in wasted soap, energy and shortened appliance life, with Elsberry in the D band at about $900. Lincoln County is the only county in our whole service area where nearly every town is in the top band.

Nobody is testing your well but you

Here's the line I repeat on every Lincoln County call, because it surprises people every time: private wells in this county are not regulated or tested under the Safe Drinking Water Act. There is no annual report coming to your mailbox. There is no state agency sampling your wellhead. Missouri does not require private wells to be tested at all, which means most of the well water in this county has never been checked by anyone, ever.

The town numbers above are the only published numbers in the county, and they're the wrong numbers for your house if you're on a well. They're still useful, though, because they tell you what the rock under you is doing. When Troy's city wells come back at 19.2 grains, that's the aquifer talking, and your well is drinking from the same aquifer.

The two kinds of Lincoln County wells

Almost every well we test in this county falls into one of two buckets, and they fail in different ways.

River bottom wells. Around Elsberry, Winfield, Old Monroe and Foley, wells sit in Mississippi and Cuivre River alluvium and shallow bedrock. Our notes on these towns say the same thing over and over: the number one nuisance is iron and manganese, meaning orange and black staining on fixtures, laundry and toilets, plus a metallic taste. Add hydrogen sulfide, the rotten egg smell, in deeper bottomland wells. Then add real bacteria risk from septic systems, livestock and seasonal flooding, and nitrate that can push past 10 mg/L in shallow wells near cropland, which is the level that matters for infants.

Upland bedrock wells. Around Troy, Silex, Hawk Point and Moscow Mills, wells go into limestone and dolomite. Those wells trade some of the iron problem for a hardness problem: our notes put typical untested private wells in this rock at 15 to 25-plus grains, which is at or above what the city systems are reporting. Deeper reducing wells still throw sulfur smell. And this is the rock that carries naturally occurring radium.

Winfield is a good illustration of why the split matters. That area sits on the radium-bearing Lincoln Fold limestone, and our own notes say the deepest wells around there can run brackish and high in sodium chloride, which is a completely different problem from the iron staining a neighbor two miles toward the river is fighting. Same county, same zip code sometimes, different water.

The Silex question, answered honestly

Everybody in this county knows the Silex story by now. Its city system measured combined radium-226 and radium-228 at 7.7 pCi/L against a federal limit of 5, a violation dating back to 2012, and residents were on bottled water for close to 20 months. What most people don't connect is what that means for the well down the road.

Here's the honest version. Silex proves the deep aquifer under this part of the county carries naturally occurring radium. It does not prove your well has it. Private wells around Silex are unregulated and essentially never tested for radium, so a neighboring well could carry the same thing and the owner would have no way of knowing. You cannot see it, smell it or taste it, and it does not show up on a hardness test or a bacteria test. It takes a dedicated radiological test. That's the whole point. Not panic, just test.

I've written up the actual town-by-town radium numbers separately, because they deserve their own careful treatment: see radium in Lincoln County wells, what the EPA numbers actually say.

The fluoride line nobody reads

This one gets missed constantly and it has nothing to do with wells at first. Four of the eight towns in this county's data carry naturally high fluoride above the 2.0 ppm level where the state requires a dental fluorosis warning: Troy at 2.59 ppm, Old Monroe at 2.59 mg/L, Winfield at 2.59 mg/L, and Hawk Point at 2.19 ppm. That warning tells parents that children under 9 should be given a different water source to protect their permanent teeth. It's printed in the towns' own reports and most families have never read it.

Why it matters to a well owner: that fluoride is coming out of the same rock your well is in. Hawk Point's well notes specifically say rural wells around there carry the same naturally elevated fluoride and radium as the city well. A softener does not touch fluoride. Reverse osmosis does.

What we actually tell people to test for

This is the short list Austin and I run through on a Lincoln County well:

• Bacteria, first, always. Coliform and E. coli. Our Moscow Mills notes cite a statewide Missouri survey that found 56% of sampled private wells positive for total coliform and 22% positive for E. coli. That's the biggest health risk on this list and the cheapest to check. Retest after any flooding.
• Hardness. Expect 15 to 25-plus grains. This is the one you already feel in your shower and your water heater.
• Iron and manganese. Especially in the bottoms. For scale on how bad this gets, Silex's own city system runs iron at 2.05 mg/L, roughly seven times the staining limit, and that's a treated system.
• Nitrate. Anywhere near cropland or an older septic field. The threshold that matters is 10 mg/L.
• Radium, if you're on deep bedrock. Troy, Silex, Hawk Point, Moscow Mills. Every three to five years is what our Foley notes recommend for bedrock wells.

Two things I'd add depending on where you are. If you're anywhere near Elsberry, know that the city's own wells tested positive for the industrial solvent TCE at 2.47 ppb along with its breakdown product and the gasoline additive MTBE at 3.83 ppb. EPA's health goal for TCE is zero. That's a documented solvent plume in that area's groundwater, and it's worth a volatile organic compounds test on a nearby well. And our Hawk Point notes flag that PFAS is documented elsewhere in this county, near Elsberry, and that private wells are never tested for it by anyone.

What I'd install, and in what order

Test first. I'm not going to sell you a stack of equipment for problems your water doesn't have. But the pattern on a typical Lincoln County well is pretty consistent: if bacteria comes back positive, UV is the fix and it goes first. Iron and manganese get their own filter ahead of the softener, because iron will foul softener resin if you make the softener do that job. Then a softener sized to your real grain number, not to a county average. Then reverse osmosis at the kitchen sink if the test shows radium, fluoride, nitrate or solvents, since that's the stage that handles the dissolved contaminants a softener was never designed to remove.

For how this county compares to the rest of what we serve, see the hardest water towns we serve, ranked by the numbers, and for the same county breakdown next door, see St. Charles County town by town. For what these hardness numbers cost a household every year, see what hard water actually costs you every year.

Frequently Asked Questions

Schedule a Free Water Test With Jones Air & Water

Whether you're on one of these eight town systems or a private well anywhere in Lincoln County, we'll test your actual water at your sink and give you your real numbers, not a county average. Free, and one of the owners does it.

Schedule your free water test, or see the water softener systems we install for hardness in this range and the filtration and reverse osmosis systems we use for iron, radium and fluoride.