The fountain that came to St. Joseph from a Chicago world's fair

Up on the grassy bluff in St. Joseph, where the land drops away to Lake Michigan, two robed figures have been pouring water for well over a century. They’re the Maids of the Mist, and they got to this Michigan beach town by way of a Chicago fair.

The fountain was cast back east in the 1870s and spent years on display at Chicago’s Interstate Industrial Exposition, the big hall that drew crowds before the more famous World’s Columbian Exposition came along. When the exposition was done with it, the figures could have ended up as scrap. Instead, H. E. Bucklen — who owned St. Joseph’s grand Whitcomb Hotel and wanted something handsome for his resort town — bought the fountain and had it brought across the lake. It was set up on the bluff in 1892 and has been a town landmark ever since.

The two maidens didn’t even have names at first. People just called them the “Stone Maidens.” A local historian gave them their names decades later, in the 1930s: Constance, who faces the lake, and Hope. Generations of St. Joseph kids have grown up thinking of them simply as the ladies on the bluff.

A fountain that sits outdoors in the lake wind for a hundred-plus years takes a beating, and this one has been rescued more than once — pulled apart and rebuilt in the 1970s, and dismantled again in recent years for a full restoration that turned up lead paint to clean off before the maidens could come home. They came back to a public celebration, returned to their spot on the bluff, doing the one thing they’ve done since Benjamin Harrison was president: standing over the big lake, calmly pouring water into the wind.