Waukesha: The Saratoga
of the West

Matthew Laflin was one of Chicago's earliest real estate magnates. Born in Massachusetts in 1803, he spent decades acquiring and developing Chicago land, eventually owning some 140 acres within the city limits, purchased in the early years for around $300. In his later years he gave the Chicago Academy of Sciences to Lincoln Park. When he came to Waukesha and believed the waters had restored his health, he decided to build the finest summer hotel west of Saratoga Springs. He was seventy years old.

In March 1873, Laflin purchased 144 acres from Mr. and Mrs. Richard Smart for $1,500. The Fountain Spring House opened in July 1874 to immediate success. When a kitchen fire burned it to the ground in September 1878, he started rebuilding the next morning. The 1879 season opened on time with a hotel twice the original size.

At the spring's heart was an octagonal springhouse where an attendant named Eugene, called "My-gene" by the children who visited, would lower a rack of glasses into the crystal water on a track, like an elevator, and hand them up full to the guests seated around the edge. Visitors wrote about the experience for decades: the mirrored pebbled bottom, the almost unbelievable clarity of it.

Matthew Laflin died on May 20, 1897. In 1905, the hotel sold to the Metropolitan Church Association of Chicago. The bottling plant closed. The hotel was remodeled and eventually demolished in the 1950s. The lot sold in July 1956 for $1.00 and "other considerations." As the springhouse came down, someone photographed the cornerstone just before the bulldozers covered it. The photo ran in the Freeman.

Everything starts here. In 1868, Colonel Richard Dunbar came to Waukesha to settle an estate, asked his sister-in-law Elizabeth Clarke Carney for a drink of water, and was pointed toward a spring in a nearby field. He bought the forty acres, named the spring Bethesda after the healing waters of Jerusalem, and began marketing the water nationally. By the early 1870s, Waukesha's hotels and boarding houses were overflowing with visitors who had read the testimonials and come to see for themselves.

Bethesda Spring Park grew up around the source over the following decades: formal grounds, a carved stone marker, a rustic pond, an entrance gate. By the summer of 1890, a local investor named Jones built a hotel directly across from that gate. The Terrace Hotel opened June 15, 1890, constructed at a cost of $10,000. The dining room ran 75 feet by 35 and seated 200. There were rooms for 100 guests. The landing on the main staircase was, as one Freeman reporter wrote, as large as a room in itself.

The Terrace is visible in period photographs of Bethesda Spring Park from around 1900, its long facade rising in the background behind the spring pond and the visitors in their white. It closed in 1927, one of the last of the original Springs Era hotels to shut its doors.

The Park Hotel stood on the south side of Broadway, directly across from Silurian Spring Park, and that location was the whole strategy. Silurian was one of the most developed resort complexes in Waukesha County, centered on a springhouse that drew visitors from across the city. The Park Hotel offered rooms across the street from all of it.

Where the Fountain Spring House and the Park View Hotel built their own spring grounds and resort infrastructure, this hotel's selling point was simpler: step outside and Waukesha's most active resort park was right in front of you.

Frances Stover, writing in the Milwaukee Journal in 1953, named the Park Hotel directly alongside Bethesda, Silurian, and the Fountain House as one of the places a former Southern visitor recalled when thinking of Waukesha at its best. That it landed in such company speaks to its standing.

Julius Reise built his hotel on a hill, which was the point. When he opened the Park View in the summer of 1881 on St. Paul Avenue, he chose the high ground deliberately: a site opposite what is now the Waukesha Engine, on twenty acres with ten comprised of a luxurious oak grove, and a sixty-foot tower dominating the three-story building. Twelve-foot ceilings. An elegant dining room. Views no downtown hotel could match.

The property also had two natural mineral springs. By 1888, a W.H. Powers had taken management of the Alma Spring on the grounds, shipping ten barrels daily. By 1891, the enterprise had split into two commercial ventures, Alma Spring and Almanaris Spring, and incorporated with $100,000 in capital. A 1892 advertising brochure described the hotel as set "on an eminence of 50 feet above the river" with "the celebrated Almanaris Springs almost in front of the hotel."

In 1901, Powers attempted to sell the property to the Elks Club as a national headquarters. Delegates came from a Milwaukee convention to tour it. The offer was refused. The Almanaris bottling plant burned on February 8, 1904. 12:15 in the morning. Ten degrees below zero. The nearest hydrant was 1,500 feet away. Loss: $8,000.

In its final years, the Park View Hotel became the Keeley Institute of Wisconsin, treating alcohol and drug addiction — still trading on Waukesha's long association with therapeutic treatment, just for different ailments. The stone building, Second Empire style with a mansard roof and columns on the front porch, burned in 1914 and was never rebuilt.

Thomas Spence built his hotel because he believed in a spring he didn't own. He had attached himself to the Horeb Spring area on the north side of Waukesha, what the 1880 History of Waukesha County described as one of the most elevated springs in the vicinity, "boiling up through a bed of gravel" with "small globes of magnesia" visible in its crystal bed. He named the grounds Spence's Grove and spent years improving them.

In December 1884, he began construction of the Hyde Park Hotel at the northwest corner of Madison and Spring Streets. The building cost between $15,000 and $20,000: sixty rooms, 30 by 70 feet, steam heat, gas lighting. Its elevation was the selling point. "Cool summer breezes," one 1892 Freeman article called them.

The business struggled. Dr. J.P. Dargitz leased it in 1892, opened the Waukesha Sanitarium inside it, and left sixteen months later after a dispute over heating equipment. The hotel, park, and observation tower went on the market together in 1897. No buyers came. In 1905, the Hyde Park Hotel sold for $1,775. The new owner planned to demolish it.

On March 31, 1906, Thomas Spence was working on the second floor of one of the partially wrecked buildings on the grounds. He fell. He suffered internal injuries, a severely injured head, and a fractured thigh. He died two days later at age 83, on the ruins of what he had built. The observation tower came down not long after.

By 1905, the Springs Era was losing its footing. The Fountain Spring House had just sold to a church. The Pure Food and Drug Act was a year away. But investors still believed in Waukesha.

The Resthaven opened in 1905 on a hilltop on Hartwell Avenue, looking out over the city below. The building was Classical Revival in style, Y-shaped in plan, with a spiraling grand staircase, deep woodwork throughout, and an indoor swimming pool. It was described at the time as the last of the grand resort hotels. That turned out to be accurate.

It operated as a resort for ten years, until 1915. Mineral water's reputation had collapsed under scientific scrutiny. The automobile was making it easy to go anywhere you liked. The Resthaven became a veterans' hospital, then a school. It's the only Springs Era hotel building in Waukesha still standing in a form you'd recognize. All the ones that were grander are gone.

The last resort to open during the Springs Era was the most forward-looking and the most unlikely. John Weber was a Milwaukee real estate agent when he purchased the property atop Prospect Avenue Hill in 1907. The land turned out to sit above a spring whose water emerged at an unusual 45 degrees, and the grounds contained deposits of dark peat soil. Weber recognized the potential and started building.

In 1911, Weber opened the Grand View Health Resort and Moor Mud Baths, offering warm mud treatments drawn from the property's own peat deposits. By 1912, he had capped the spring and built a springhouse over it, running pipe lines to the resort's supply tanks. The original hotel had 30 rooms; at its peak it held 200. A golf course, built in 1915 by Andrew Frame, wrapped around the property and still operates today as Moor Downs Golf Course.

From 1925 to 1947, over 130,000 people received the treatment. Through the Depression years the resort drew a wealthy Chicago clientele, known by then as much for the poker tables and fine dining as for the mud. The hotel closed in 1959. It became a seminary, then briefly a college, then county offices.

In 2022, the Waukesha Common Council voted to demolish the main structure, agreeing to preserve the springhouse and golf course clubhouse for the next ten years.