When Fruitport sold Chicago its mineral water

On July 1, 1871, a grand hotel called the Pomona House opened its doors at the head of Spring Lake, and for a few seasons sleepy little Fruitport tried to become a spa town for the rich.

The whole gamble rode on water. This was the heyday of the “magnetic” mineral spring — a national craze built on the belief that water bubbling up through the right rock could cure whatever ailed you, from rheumatism to bad nerves. Towns all over Michigan went prospecting for springs the way others chased silver, and Fruitport found its angle: a company organized around the local springs put up the Pomona House to sell the cure in comfort. Wealthy Chicagoans steamed across the lake to Grand Haven, came on to Fruitport, and settled in to “take the waters,” stroll the grounds, and idle by the lake. For a stretch, a fruit-country village barely off the map had genuine big-city ambitions.

It didn’t take. The Pomona House caught fire in the early 1880s and was never rebuilt, and right about then the whole mineral-springs fad fizzled nationwide as the medicine behind it failed to deliver. The grand hotel was gone, the steamers stopped coming, and Fruitport quietly went back to being Fruitport.

The lake is still there, of course, and so is the trick of imagination. Next time you’re idling along Spring Lake on a hot afternoon, picture the steamer trunks and the parasols, a verandah full of Chicago money come west to drink the water and be healed. Quiet places almost always had a louder past — this one just left no building to prove it.