Waukesha: The Saratoga of the West

The city of Waukesha sits about eighteen miles west of Milwaukee, and for roughly forty years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was one of the most fashionable destinations in the American Midwest. People came not for its scenery or its culture but for its water.

Waukesha was first settled by Yankees from New England in the eighteen thirties, first settled in eighteen thirty-four, and grew into a modest county seat serviced by the railroad. What changed everything was a man known as Colonel Richard Dunbar. Dunbar arrived in Waukesha with diabetes, drank from a local spring in eighteen sixty-eight, and believed the water cured him. He purchased the property, named the spring Bethesda, and launched a bottling company. The water, naturally carbonated and rich with dissolved minerals, spread through medical networks as a treatment for kidney disease, indigestion, and a range of conditions that Victorian medicine attributed to impure drinking water.

Within a few years Waukesha had many mineral spring operations, and visitors arrived by train in great numbers during the summer season. Hotels and resort cottages multiplied along the spring corridors. The wealthy came: Richard Sears of Sears and Roebuck kept a home here. Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's widow, is said to have come to drink the waters. Guidebooks called Waukesha the Saratoga of the West, comparing it to the famous spa town in upstate New York.

At its peak, dozens of spring-water companies operated in and around the city, shipping bottled water across the country and exporting it to Europe.

The era ended quietly. Germ theory eventually undermined the health claims. Municipal water systems improved across American cities, removing the comparative advantage of spring water. The resort hotels closed one by one through the nineteen teens and twenties. Most of the springs were paved over as Waukesha grew into a standard industrial suburb.

A few springs still flow. Bethesda Spring itself remains, marked and accessible, a small reminder of the Victorian conviction that the answer to whatever ailed you was just underground.