SOUTH PARIS — A thick stream of ice-cold water gushes from a pipe jutting out of a grassy embankment at a dip in the road to Buckfield, about 3 miles east of the village of Paris Hill.

It’s like this all day, every day, year-round.

About every 15 minutes on a late Thursday morning in July, somebody stopped: a couple from Lisbon after shopping at Walmart, a man with a small dog and four 5-gallon jugs, a woman who moved to Norway from Massachusetts five years ago.

Instead of using Brita filters or stocking up at the supermarket, they come to Cooper Spring, where the pure-tasting, mineral-rich water is free, aside from the gas money to get there.

It’s one of three roadside springs — all in Oxford County — that the state regulates, testing monthly for contaminants. On weekends, people line up to fill containers of various sizes to bring home for drinking and cooking, whether they have concerns about what’s in their tap water, believe this has to be healthier for them or prefer the taste — often all three.

There are other, unregulated springs around, but the Maine Center for Disease Control & Prevention recommends against drinking from them because of their susceptibility to contamination. There used to be more, maybe 150 statewide, according to a Press Herald story from 1997, when the Legislature passed a law exempting them from state regulation.

Many were already gone by then, covered by highway crews to prevent traffic hazards or shut down by property owners after the state tried to require regular testing earlier that decade. The state still oversees these three because they meet the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s definition of a public water supply, serving an average of 25 or more people a day at least 60 days a year.

No matter the weather conditions, the springs never dry up, so they’re particularly busy during droughts, said Jim Chandler, who has overseen the testing at Bryant Pond Spring for 25 years.

That spring, on Route 26 headed toward Bethel, is popular with people who have camps on the nearby ponds, Chandler said, but on that Thursday also drew a family in an RV on their way home to Arizona after spending a month camping in Nova Scotia (they recognized it from TikTok) and Ben Scipione of Falmouth, a salesman for Quality Insulation, who pulled over to fill up his water bottle on his way to a job site.

Scipione has been stopping at the spring since he was a kid coming through with his family on their way to go skiing. He likes that the water comes straight from the earth.

“It’s not being shipped. It’s not being treated,” he said. Plus, there’s the taste.

Chandler said he knows of at least one Poland Spring employee who, despite getting an allotment of free water through work, prefers it from Bryant Pond.

“It’s the best water, I think, in the state,” Scipione said.

About a half-hour drive northeast, through backroads to Peru, a couple was refilling 42 empty 1-gallon Arizona iced tea jugs with water from the spring just north of Worthley Pond on Greenwoods Road.

They wouldn’t give their names — nor would most people who filled up at the springs — but said they’d heard about nearby wells testing positive for arsenic and weren’t going to risk it with theirs, which they share with neighbors and don’t have control over.

Brian Smith, who lives in Oakland in the winter and has a camp in Peru, said anyone like him who draws their water from the lake comes to the spring for their drinking supply. He always has a couple empty gallon jugs in his van at the ready for when he drives by.

“If there’s no line, I fill up what I’ve got,” he said.