I grew up on the North Mountain of Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley, near a community called Spa Springs. In the late eighteenth century, this area was part of Wilmot township and was near the plantation of the prominent Loyalist Timothy Ruggles.1 By the early nineteenth century, it was known as Wilmot Springs, named for a mineral spring reputed to have healing properties. As visitors flocked to the springs, a Victorian spa and hotel were built and became well known. Fires destroyed the buildings by the early twentieth century, and the springs’ popularity faded.
By the 1990s, the Victorian spa survived only in local memory. Everyone knew the site of the old hotel: a spot now nestled in the woods off Highway 362. I passed it daily on the school bus. As Spa Springs was part of my childhood, I was immediately intrigued when, last year, I found a reference in the Nova Scotia Archives card catalogue: “Register of Guests, Wilmot Springs Hotel.”2 I knew it had to be the register of the bygone hotel I had imagined as a ghostly presence at the edge of the field.
As a historian of religion, I was interested in what the register might reveal about how people interacted with the mineral waters of Wilmot Springs. For centuries, people have visited natural springs and utilized water from such sites for healing. In North America, Indigenous people and European settlers each had their own traditions concerning the sacred and medicinal powers of water.3 The register shows how Wilmot Springs fit within this broader history of curative waters. Examining the culture of curiosity, travel, and healing that developed there contributes to the environmental history of the Maritimes while expanding the study of lived religion in the region. Although the waters were often described in secular terms, biblical, classical, and alchemical references in newspapers and other accounts imbued the site with spiritual, metaphysical, and sublime meanings.
Details of the “discovery” of Wilmot Springs are unclear, but since 1817 the site had been known for its healing waters. Subsequently, the waters attracted hundreds of visitors seeking cures for various ailments. A hotel was operating by 1831 when the land was owned by the Woodbury family, and larger spa facilities were later built as the site developed into a fashionable summer resort.4 An 1880s brochure praised the waters for their “curative qualities” and claimed that the mineral-rich mud possessed remarkable healing powers for skin diseases.5 Amid five acres “of primeval forest,” the spa and its setting – where “bubble up these hygean waters for the healing of the nations” – offered visitors both a therapeutic spring and a cool, peaceful retreat from summer heat. The surrounding glade, with its “balsam-laden air,” was itself considered restorative.6 In 1844, journalist and politician Joseph Howe similarly recalled the springs as a refreshing oasis, contrasting its “pure fountain” and “sylvan scenery” with the “dust and bustle” of summer in Halifax.7
The popularity of Wilmot Springs reflected a broader nineteenth-century interest in outdoor bathing. As industrialization reshaped ideas of cleanliness, bathing in springs, pools, rivers, and bays was increasingly associated with health, hygiene, and moral improvement. The rise of hydropathy further transformed mineral and thermal springs into popular destinations.8
When the hotel opened in 1831, a Halifax newspaper reported that Wilmot Springs was “exciting general attention” and drawing visitors from throughout the province. “Very many persons we are informed have received benefit from it.”9 A few years later, geologist and physician Abraham Gesner described the Wilmot waters as possessing “medicinal properties of considerable importance.” When the spring’s virtues were first widely known, Gesner recalled that people “hastened to the waters, then supposed to be the elixir vitæ” – an alchemical “elixir of life,” or fountain of youth. Scientific analysis found iodine, lime, sulphuric acid, and magnesia in the water.10 By the late nineteenth century, Wilmot’s waters were bottled and marketed under the name “Spadeau” mineral water.11
Visitors to Wilmot came from across northeastern North America, with some travelling from as far as North Carolina and California. Initially unenclosed, the springs later featured separate hot and cold bathing facilities and showers. The spa’s proximity to the Bay of Fundy, with its “wonderful tides and bracing sea air,” further attracted those seeking therapeutic relief.12 Visitors could take day trips to the bay and enjoy the salubrious fog and sea air for which Nova Scotia was renowned.13
Certainly, the Wilmot waters attracted skeptics. One visitor investigated claims of their “panaceal virtues,” mocking those who came to “this well in the wilderness” hoping to find a balm for their afflictions.14 Yet many visitors reported genuine improvements. In 1831, Nicholas Falmor testified that the waters had positively affected his cancer. That same year, Donald McPherson reported that his daughter’s two-year case of the “King’s Evil” (scrofula) was completely cured after four weeks of using the water and mud.15
Throughout the century, visitors continued to report remarkable cures. In 1887, C. J. Gates, an Annapolis Valley resident, described suffering from nervous debility and pleurisy after spending time in an asylum in Worcester, Massachusetts. After returning to Nova Scotia, doctors advised him “to try Warm Baths of the Spa Water.” He began drinking and bathing in the waters and soon felt his “Health and Strength restored.” Similarly, Mrs. P. H. Bent of Kingston, Nova Scotia, had suffered for years from kidney troubles and a “disease peculiar to women.” Though she initially had “little faith,” she was willing to try the spa. She found the baths’ effect so “marked and beneficial” as to seem “almost marvelous,” leading her to believe that continued use could produce a complete and lasting cure for “women weakness.”16
The Wilmot waters’ renown emerged in rural Nova Scotia amid a wider nineteenth-century culture of cure-seeking and therapeutic experimentation, even as medicine was becoming increasingly professionalized.17 For historians, the spring’s long-term popularity also complicates any simple progression from a religious past to secular modernity. Wilmot Springs was never couched in the language of religion or saints (as are many holy wells), but its waters were linked to the sublimity of its sylvan setting. When tested, the waters also showed trace elements that led some to conclude the waters were a healing marvel. As industrialization advanced, nineteenth-century people continued to utilize “natural” cures (often ones drawn from their environment), especially when newly available medical treatments failed to heal their afflictions.
[1] Catherine Cottreau-Robins, “A Loyalist Plantation in Nova Scotia, 1784–1800” (PhD dissertation: Dalhousie University, 2012).
[2] Register of Guests, Wilmot Springs Hotel, MG-4, vol. 159, Nova Scotia Archives (NSA).
[3] Patricia Erfurt-Cooper and Malcolm Cooper, eds., Health and Wellness Tourism: Spas and Hot Springs (Toronto: Channel View Publications, 2009), 49–108. Also, Celeste Ray, ed., Sacred Waters: A Cross-Cultural Compendium of Hallowed Springs and Holy Wells (New York: Routledge, 2020); Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 395–470; and Steve Simon, Healing Waters: The Pilgrimage to Lac Ste. Anne (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1995).
[4] Spadeau, Natural Mineral Water from Wilmot Spa Springs, Historical Sketch and Account of Its Curative Properties, MG-100, vol. 246, no. 20d, NSA.
[5] Spadeau,4.
[6] Spadeau,1.
[7] “The Wilmot Spring,” The Novascotian (Halifax), 1 July 1844.
[8] Kathleen Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 293–324. For a contemporaneous perspective, see John Bell, A Treatise on Baths, including Cold, Sea, Warm, Hot, Vapour, Gas, and Mud Baths (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1859).
[9] Nova Scotia Royal Gazette (Halifax), 17 August 1831.
[10] Abraham Gesner, Remarks on the Geology and Mineralogy of Nova Scotia (Halifax: Gossip and Coade, 1836), 78–79.
[11] Spadeau, 6–7.
[12] Spadeau, 2.
[13] Sara Spike, “‘A Salubrious, Saline Exhalation’: Fog and Health in Colonial Newfoundland and Nova Scotia,” NiCHE (Network in Canadian History and Environment), 27 August 2020: https://niche-canada.org/2020/08/27/a-salubrious-saline-exhalation-fog-and-health-in-colonial-newfoundland-and-nova-scotia/.
[14] “Wilmot Springs,” The Novascotian, 21 September 1831.
[15] Register of Guests, NSA.
[16] Register of Guests, NSA.
[17] Eva Moskowitz, In Therapy We Trust: America’s Obsession with Self-Fulfillment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2001), 10–29.
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