The area of Fountain began with two brick homes built by George Atcheson, and Daniel Shook came from Pennsylvania to operate a blacksmith shop and farm. Eagle Cliff, a large settlement at the base of the bluff near Fountain Creek named for nesting eagles on the nearby bluff, had a post office from July 1842 to June 1867, with mail exchanged in the store. Stephen Miles was the architect of Eagle Cliff, with most construction completed by Isaac Eberman, and the settlement included a tavern, general store, implement shop, blacksmith shop, and grain elevator. Miles owned much property in the area, and after his death in 1858 he was buried in a stone and marble mausoleum atop the bluffs overlooking his landholdings; the tomb had space for 56 vault burials and reportedly cost $10,000 to complete, later suffering vandalism before volunteers led by the cemetery's board of directors cleaned and stabilized it. When the railroad came through in the early 1900's, the store at Eagle Cliff moved near the station, and the small settlement took the name Fountain after nearby Fountain Creek. Stephen Miles's home, built in 1844, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 but was demolished by its owners in 1981 for lack of preservation and restoration funds. The community's first school was built in 1880, and Miles Prairie School District 43 opened a new school south of Fountain off Bluff Road in 1925 that served the area until 1951, with Mathilda Schilling as its first teacher and Thelma Hess as its last. The grain elevator at Fountain became the railroad receiving station for the Schoening and Koenigsmark Mills, but it eventually closed after cooperative elevators were built in Fults, Columbia, Maeys Station, and Waterloo. Bald eagles, long absent from the landscape, returned after standing water from the 1993 flood provided food, and trees along Fountain Creek offered nesting habitat, while the Fountain Tavern remained open and the Stuckmeyer family continued to brighten the landscape with a vegetable, plant, and flower farm.