Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania's Mineral Water Resort

Between eighteen eighty-four and nineteen fifteen, the small borough of Cambridge Springs in northwestern Pennsylvania was one of the most fashionable health destinations in the northeastern United States. It started with a farm and a discovery.

Doctor John H. Gray found that the spring water on his property had unusual mineral properties and began prescribing and marketing it in eighteen eighty-four. Word spread fast. By the early nineteen hundreds, Cambridge Springs had dozens of inns and resort hotels operating at once, including the grand Hotel Rider and the Riverside Inn. Passenger trains carried visitors from distant cities, who believed the mineral waters could cure everything from rheumatism to nervous exhaustion.

The resort era was real but brief. As medical science moved away from spa treatments and toward pharmaceutical interventions, the health-tourism market dried up. By nineteen fifteen the heyday was over. The springs are still here. Most of the grand hotels are not.