Lithia Park and the Rotten-Egg Resort That Never Was
Near Ashland, Oregon
Ashland's most beautiful public space is the result of a plan that failed completely. Around nineteen oh seven a lithia water spring was discovered near Emigrant Lake, a few miles east of town. Analysis showed the water carried an exceptionally high concentration of lithium, reportedly the second highest measured in any natural spring in North America.
Lithia water had been fashionable in the American health resort industry for decades, promoted as a treatment for a variety of ailments, and Ashland's civic leaders saw an opportunity. A local journalist named Bert Greer campaigned vigorously for a bond issue to fund a mineral spa at the park along Ashland Creek. Voters approved it.
The town engaged John McLaren, the legendary landscape architect who had designed Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, to lay out the park grounds. In nineteen fourteen a pump and pipeline were built to bring the spring water from Emigrant Lake into town, and fountains were eventually installed to dispense the lithia water to visitors. The problem was the water itself.
It smells strongly of sulfur and tastes, in the words of most people who have tried it, roughly as one might expect from something that smells like rotten eggs. Efforts to bottle and sell the water commercially never became a lasting business. The health fad faded.
The resort never materialized. The public fountains still dispense the famous lithia water in Lithia Park today, and visitors still take one sip and hand the cup back. What remains as Ashland's great public gift is McLaren's park design itself, the trees and paths and creek-side meadows that make Lithia Park one of the finest urban parks in Oregon.
