When New Baltimore was a resort town with salt baths

The quiet waterfront downtown along Anchor Bay was once the liveliest spot in the whole county. Between 1860 and 1880, New Baltimore grew from a shipping-and-barrel town into the busiest community in Macomb County. It did it by becoming a place people came to relax. There was an opera house. There were hotels, saloons, and a brewery. And — the part that sounds strangest now — there were salt baths, where visitors soaked in mineral water that bubbled up from underground. It was the same craze that made nearby Mount Clemens famous as “Bath City.”

The town started smaller and plainer. In 1845 a Mount Clemens businessman named Alfred Ashley platted 60 acres on both sides of Washington Street. The settlement that grew there was first called Ashleyville, after the post office that opened in 1851. The waterfront did the early heavy lifting. Lumber, building materials, and farm goods went out by boat from the local mills. The place made a bit of everything — barrels, brooms, bricks, even coffins and corsets.

Then the resort era arrived and reinvented the place. Lakeside hotels, summer and winter recreation, and those salt baths pulled in crowds, and the town leaned all the way into being a destination. New Baltimore became a village in 1867 and a city in 1931. The opera house and the brewery are long gone. But the bones of that boom are still easy to read if you walk the old downtown grid toward the water — narrow lots, brick storefronts, and a waterfront park where the steamboats once landed on the bay.