The original Jacob's Well mentioned in the Bible (Genesis, Ch.29) was, of course, in Samaria and is reputedly still in existence within a small church near Nablus. The name also applies to a number of present day places in Queensland Australia, Toronto Canada, Kansas City Missouri,and Arizona, Nevada and Texas in the U.S.A. There may be others of which we are not aware.

Locally the name "Jacobs Well" existed for some time before there was a village but originally seems to have referred only to a tiny area of just one field and two buildings by the crossroads. Bear in mind that the word "well" also applies to a natural spring, of which there were many in this area.

The earliest local occurrence of the name which we were able to find was on the Ordnance Surveyors' drawings made during their initial survey of 1806-1807. These drawings are kept in the Map Library of the British Library.

The resultant map (left) was not published until 1816. The words "Jacobs Well" are written beneath the stretch of Clay Lane between the Woking Road and Blanchards Hill.

However a map of Surrey (below) published in 1823 by Christopher and John Greenwood places the name quite clearly at the crossroads and names Hurst Farm at the junction of Clay Lane and the Woking Road.

The first occurrence of the name in the Worplesdon parish register is the record of the baptism of Ann, daughter of John and Mary Gunner, on 26th June 1836. John Gunner is not mentioned in the 1841 Tithe Apportionment so we cannot identify whereabouts he lived.

The Tithe map of 1841 does not show the name and the Tithe Apportionment documents refer only to "Jacobs Well field" which lay immediately east of Blanchards Hill, and was divided into five strips, shared between three owners.

In 1963, in response to an editorial question in the Surrey Advertiser about how Jacobs Well got its name, Mr H. Farris wrote in to say that the answer was really quite simple. "In my boyhood days", he wrote, "there was, in the bank on the other side of the road (the Woking Road), opposite to Willow Grange, an ancient brick well." (There is still a low brick wall at about this spot.) "Owing to its age and the fact that it was a roadside well, everybody knew it as Jacob's Well. In the area around there were only a very few houses and it was to this area that the old well gave its name. I know that it was still there in the late 1890s."

In 1983, after a report of the sale of Jacobs Well Cottage had included a comment that a well in the garden might be the one from which the village got its name, the above idea surfaced again. Mr Lawrie Grey, who was born in the cottage in 1915 and lived there until 1935, expressed his support for Mr Farris' view that the village took its name from the well on "Treeby's Hill" (now part of Woking Road, north of Salt Box Road). Mr Matthew Alexander, Curator of Guildford Museum, suggested at the time that it is not inconceivable that the well referred to was named after the village, rather than the other way around. However, as we shall see, the name was in use long before there was even a hamlet. All maps and documents including Census Returns and Electoral Rolls, but with the slightly ambiguous exception of the first OS map mentioned above, distinguish three separate areas - Jacobs Well at the crossroads, Hurst at the Woking Road, and Stringers Common almost everywhere else.

Before leaving this subject it seems worth mentioning that on a map drawn in 1686 there is a small, unexplained, symbol at the approximate spot described by Mr Farris, and that in 1841 the adjacent field was named "Well Field".

It may also be of interest that in the chapel of Abbott's Hospital in Guildord there is a stained glass window illustrating the bible story of Jacob's Well (Genesis, Chapter 29).

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