Palmer, Bell, and the Founding of La Font
Near Manitou Springs, Colorado
This town was the deliberate creation of two men with a railroad and a business plan. General William Jackson Palmer was the Civil War veteran and railroad builder who founded neighboring Colorado Springs and ran the Denver and Rio Grande line. His partner was Doctor William Abraham Bell, an English physician and civil engineer who had crossed the Atlantic to help survey the West.
In eighteen seventy-two, Palmer and Bell laid out a town at the mineral springs, meaning it from the start to be a scenic health resort. Bell surveyed the land, platted the townsite, and advertised the curative waters far and wide to draw the sick and the curious. The partners built the Manitou House, the first large hotel, standing across from the springs to house health seekers who had come chasing relief from ailments like dyspepsia and consumption.
Their first choice of name was La Font, French for the fountain, a nod to the bubbling water. But a business associate named William Blackmore, an English financier, is said to have pushed instead for Manitou, the Native word for the Great Spirit, which he had encountered in Longfellow's poem. The name stuck.
Bathhouses and hotels followed within a few years, and the resort town grew quickly around the time Colorado became a state.
