The Mineral Water Town

A former sailor named John Frazier drilled a well near this beach in the early eighteen eighties, and a second well on the property tested as chemically similar to a famous European spa. The results came back: the mineral composition of his California well water was chemically similar to the famous thermal springs at Karlsbad, in Bohemia, a spa town that European aristocracy had been visiting for centuries.

Frazier renamed his farm Carlsbad. He platted it as a city. He opened the Carlsbad Hotel in eighteen eighty-six and began selling the water nationally under the name the American Carlsbad. For a few decades it worked magnificently. The town drew health tourists from across the country, people seeking the same mineral cures that Bohemian royalty paid fortunes to obtain in Europe, now available on the California coast for considerably less.

The Great Depression ended it. The wells fell into disrepair, then were lost entirely, buried under sixty years of development and indifference. Carlsbad kept the name but forgot the story.

Then in nineteen ninety-four, a man who had grown up in Karlovy Vary, the Czech Republic city that Karlsbad had become after the war, moved to California specifically to restore the original connection. He found the wells. He reopened them. A city that had been named for a Bohemian spring on the basis of a laboratory report from eighteen eighty-two once again had its mineral water, and the man who restored it had grown up drinking from the spring that had started the whole chain.

The identity of an entire California city, the name on every street sign and business card, traces back to a farmer's stomach ailment and a lab result.