The Spring Lake hotel that found mineral water while drilling for salt

The men drilling near the lake in 1870 were looking for salt. Michigan had salt under it, and a barrel of it was worth real money, so a company sank a well on the old Hopkins Mill site and waited to strike brine. What came up instead was mineral water — the faintly metallic, faintly eggy kind that nineteenth-century Americans were convinced could cure almost anything.

So the drillers changed their plans entirely. By 1871 the Spring Lake House stood over the well, a 150-room summer hotel built to sell the water as a tonic. People came by the hundreds to soak in it, drink it, and stroll the grounds, and nearly every house in the village started taking in boarders to handle the overflow. The water itself got bottled and shipped all over the country, a little piece of Spring Lake carried off to medicine cabinets in cities that had never seen the place.

For a few decades it worked. The resort became one of the most famous in the whole Michigan resort belt, back when “taking the waters” was a thing comfortable families did every summer. Spring Lake had reinvented itself once already — from a lumber town, when six sawmills ran inside village limits and the timber finally gave out around 1889 — and the mineral springs were the second act.

Fire ended it. The Spring Lake House burned down in 1916, and that was that; nobody rebuilt a 150-room spa hotel for a cure that medicine had quietly stopped believing in. Fire, honestly, is half the story of old Spring Lake — an 1871 mill blaze left seventy families homeless, and on a windy day in May 1893 sparks from the river steamboat Barrett set a sawdust pile alight and took more than half the village with it. The springs are long capped now. But for a stretch of summers, a salt company’s lucky miss made this quiet lakeshore town a place the whole country mailed off for.