Travel > Places > New England

'Resort ghost towns' come unsprung

By Diane Foulds, Globe Correspondent, 11/17/02

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		Printable version How to get there What survives of New England's mineral spring resorts is in small towns and easy to find. Ask the locals for directions. What to do Stafford Historical Society 5 Spring St. Stafford Springs, Conn. 860-684-7978, by appointment www.geocities.com/staffordhistorical Sand Springs Water Co. 160 Sand Springs Road Williamstown, Mass. 413-458-8281 Call for tour. Middletown Springs Historical Society Museum Middletown, Vt. On the town green, next to the church 802-235-2376 or 802-235-2800 By appointment. Poland Spring Museum and Spring House 115 Preservation Way Poland Spring, Maine 207-998-7143 www.polandspring.com/activities/pres-park.asp Open daily, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., except Mondays. Run by the Perrier-owned Poland Spring Water company. Where to stay Priscilla's Victorian Inn 52 South St., Middletown Springs, Vt. 802-235-2299 Mountain views and a crackling fireplace in vintage 1880 decor. Walking distance from the springs. Doubles $75-$95. The Inn Keeper's Place 111 Stafford St., Stafford, Conn. 860-684-7202 Historic, antique-filled house on town's oldest street. Doubles $85-$125. Green River Bridge House 2435 Stage Road, Guilford, Vt. 802-257-5771 www.greenriverbridgehouse.com Newly restored 1830 home with views and next to a covered bridge. Spa treatments available. About 2 miles from the old Mineral Springs Farm. Doubles $165-$235. Where to eat Arizona Family Restaurant 81 Main St., Stafford Springs, Conn. 860-684-4003 Hearty Italian fare, the name notwithstanding. Entrees $12-$15. Sal's South 15 South Main St., Wallingford, Vt. 802-446-2935 Italian fare in casual, antique-filled decor about 10 miles from Middletown Springs. Entrees $8-$15. Peter Haven's Restaurant 32 Elliot St., Brattleboro, Vt. 802-257-3333 Excellent seafood in relaxed, understated ambience, only minutes from Guilford. Call ahead for reservations. Entrees $20-$25.

Before grand hotels, before ski resorts, even before autumn leaves made it a popular destination, New England was the mecca to a different breed of traveler — the invalid, with illnesses real and imagined.

In the 19th century, thousands migrated to Northern medicinal springs to "take the waters," whose healing properties soothed aching joints, relieved rheumatism, healed sores, and cured everything from piles to dropsy, dysentery, and impotence — or so the patrons believed. If the minerals weren't therapeutic, a good soak never hurt, and because misery loves company, the social whirl was frosting on the cake.

Nursing my first autumn cold, I felt the need for a little palliative treatment. But instead of frequenting one of the salon-like "day spas" that have proliferated in recent years, I decided to seek out one of the vintage New England resorts.

In Connecticut, I discovered Stafford Springs, a town of 2,000 just south of the Massachusetts line. In front of the town hall, a fountain sputters, a two-tiered model dating from 1894. You fill your cup from the top, and livestock drink from the bottom. "I've tasted the stuff," Christopher Wigren told me at the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, where he is deputy director. "Not so bad at first, but it gets nastier as it sits."

A Victorian spring house sits virtually forgotten on Spring Street, and in Hyde Park across the way, a monument marks the spot of the sulfur spring "used by visiting Indians."

"These springs were the first ones, before Saratoga," said Isabell Zabilansky, curator of the Historical Society Museum. The relics of bygone hotels fill the museum's cases: old menus, newspaper ads, pieces of china, a room key, a serving bar, and lots of old photos. The museum itself was a bottling plant from 1866 to 1893.

Today Stafford is "a resort ghost town," wrote the late Cleveland Amory back in 1952. In his book "The Last Resorts," Amory records the lament of an 18th-century Englishman that at one Stafford resort, "prayers, hymns, and chapters of the Bible were quoted before breakfast," and evenings were spent "singing hymns."

More interesting doings had once been afoot across town. John Adams, second US president, had taken a water cure. The Marquis de Lafayette held forth at the Hyde Tavern. Though the tavern is gone now, Alvin Hyde's home is The Inn Keeper's Place bed-and-breakfast, and it was there that Lafayette actually slept. Out back, the springs erupt randomly throughout the Nipmuck State Forest.

Still in search of an authentic soak, I headed north. My target was Williamstown, Mass., New England's sole thermal springs. It is the Berkshires' biggest secret, an Elysian field near the Massachusetts-Vermont line. Two springs spew from deep rock fissures. One feeds a swimming pool on tree-shaded grounds with a cupola-topped bathhouse, and the other washes into a separately-owned bottling plant, the Sand Springs Water Co.

The George family bought the pool in 1950 and turned it into a community sanctuary. The water stays a constant 74 degrees Fahrenheit year round. Balmy in the summertime, it feels a little cool in the winter, which is why the pool closes October to May.

Like so many New England springs, it had been an Indian healing ground. By the 1880s, the "Wampanoag Sand Springs" had become a playground for the rich, who spent the summer supine and submerged. Overgrown steps are all that remain of the majestic Greylock Hall, the 350-room spa hotel that burned in 1886.

But an Old World grace emanates from the yellowed photos, postcards, and embossed bottles preserved at the bottling plant next door. Hidden in the back are six concrete baths with marble steps, the originals. You can just imagine Victorian ladies lowering themselves into the water in full-body bathing apparel.

Water cures lost their allure as advances were made in pharmacology, and seaside resorts like Newport, R.I., and Bar Harbor, Maine, grew more fashionable. By the turn of the century, most of the "springs" hotels had vanished.

In Vermont, a handful still exist. One is in Guilford Center, a hamlet south of Brattleboro. The rambling white Guilford Mineral Springs Farm flourished in 1869, bottling waters and welcoming guests from as far as San Francisco and London. It went bankrupt in six years. The house is still there, but the springs are gone.

Even more impressive is the hotel in Clarendon Springs. The village has changed little since the Civil War. At its center is the 1835 Clarendon House, resplendent in balconies, verandas, and dormers. Southerners came up in droves to take the waters, slaves in tow, until Vermont's abolitionist sentiments drove them away.

The hotel thrived, piping mineral water from the small spring house across the river into the indoor baths of its 52 guest rooms. In front of the hotel, the water still spouts from a pipe rising periscope-like on the town green.

Clarendon's waters are steeped in legend. In 1776, so the tale goes, Asa Smith was visited by a dream that a nearby spring would cure his "scrofulous humor," a glandular condition once linked to tuberculosis. The next day he tracked it down, drank from it, packed its mud onto his aching body, and was cured.

In old photos, guests swarm from the hotel's balconies and mingle on the street. Yet today the town is quiet, and the hotel's exterior is deceiving: It is just a shell. The surrounding houses, formerly taverns, stores, and servants' quarters, are private homes.

While in its prime in the late 1850s, Clarendon Springs was one of 31 Vermont health spas, milking one of 126 springs.

An even posher resort prospered 10 miles south, at Middletown Springs. It was the five-story Hotel Montvert ("Vermont" rearranged). A historic marker on South Street tells the story of its 1871 opening. I drove up the dirt lane and past the stone gates. The road curved up and around what used to be a lavish summer resort. Like squatters, a grove of pines has crowded over the luxurious lawn where ladies and gents played croquet. But the graceful white barn with the cupola — the livery stable — hasn't changed.

The hotel's foundations can be found among the pines, along with a circular cavity where the water fountain used to be. Though the bathhouses have disappeared, a replica of the spring house graces a small park next to the post office. I sipped the water, and it was delicious.

"I consider the water invaluable," wrote Jenne Wilson in 1872 after a visit here. "I have saved my senses of hearing, seeing, and taste, and I honestly believe — my life."

The medicinal springs gave Vermont its first taste of tourism. You can see when the prosperity hit by the age of the finer houses. The most beautiful is a white mansion with a widow's walk that has been converted into a bed-and-breakfast, Priscilla's Victorian Inn.

Mud baths were not on the menu, but I drank in the 1880 decor: a player piano, wall-high mirrors, stereoscopes, grandfather clocks, and fringed lampshades. At breakfast, a fire crackled as I gazed at the mountains. It worked like a tonic.

The enigma of Middletown Springs is that its waters disappeared one day after an 1811 flood, and reemerged 57 years later. The Montvert was razed in 1905, its contents auctioned off. Perhaps hotels and mineral springs can be a lethal combination.

It seems so at Brunswick Springs in Vermont's remote Northeast Kingdom. Like Sand Springs, it was a sacred Indian site. An old story tells of an Abenaki curse that vowed ruin to anyone attempting to use the springs for commercial gain. In fact, four hotels went up there in the 19th century, and each burned to the ground, one after another.

Their foundations are visible today, along with a stairway leading down the west bank of the Connecticut River to a semicircular row of spigots, each gushing water said to contain different mineral properties. Curiosity-collector Robert Ripley described Brunswick Springs as the eighth wonder of the world, but the real wonder is that it is again Abenaki-owned. A tribe member told me that outsiders are welcome to explore, so I walked the half-mile trail from behind the Brunswick Town Hall on Route 102. The setting was magical, all right. The mineral springs trickle into a small pool, smelling faintly of sulfur.

Poland Spring, a Maine spa some 26 miles north of Portland, was my last hope for a soak. It had flourished in the 1870s, but its pride, the 350-room Poland Spring House hotel, burned in 1975. Some secondary buildings have survived, including the Presidential Inn and 11 historic cottages.

Spring water is piped right into the rooms, and the old spring house has been restored. You can't take the waters, but the Perrier-owned Poland Spring Co. obligingly hands out bottled samples.

One option remained for a mineral bath, though it meant leaving New England. You can still take the waters the old-fashioned way in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., some 30 miles from the Vermont border. But in the end, I decided not to make the trip. Somehow, steeping in the memories was cure enough.

Diane Foulds is a freelance writer who lives in Burlington, Vt.