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27917 text 01.qxp 7/9/08 1:23 PM Page 34 1 2 2 Inventing the Resort Saratoga Springs W hile Ballston Spa was being built, the nearby springs at Saratoga remained quite rustic, despite the higher regard in which connoisseurs held the waters.1 The springs had first come to the attention of outsiders after a legendary 1771 visit by Sir William Johnson, when one of the springs, High Rock, supposedly cured him of the lingering consequences of an old war wound, a cure so efficacious that the previously crippled hero purportedly walked the fifteen miles back to Schenectady. His accommodations at the springs were a Mohawk hunting hut covered with hides. In 1773, there was a brief attempt at permanent settlement, but it was abandoned in the face of the oncoming Revolution­ ary War.2 More people learned about the springs during the American Revolu­ tion, and at the end of the war in 1783, with the end of organized Indian resistance in New York, white men came to settle permanently in Saratoga. During these years, some famous visitors on their way to Bemis Heights diverted to Saratoga. They included General Philip Schuyler, who spent a summer at the springs in a walled tent, and it was legend in Saratoga that George Washington himself had come. In 1787, Samuel Latham Mitchill, a famous chemist and author, visited the springs. His published analysis of the waters would become a standard work for boosters of the springs and was reprinted in a wide variety of later works. At the time of his visit, Saratoga still consisted of only a single log cabin, the first settler’s home, built in 1773 and reoccupied ten years later. A 1789 visitor was told that “wild beasts were very numerous and bold in the surrounding forest,” and 34 27917 text 01.qxp 7/9/08 1:23 PM Page 35 35 Inventing the Resort she and her fellow travelers spent a worried night there, having been warned that the wolves and bears “sometimes, when hungry, approached the house.”3 But steady hunting thinned the wild animals, and in 1789, in­ spired by the small but steady stream of visitors, Alexander Bryan, the owner of the cabin, made a modest expansion to it. That year, two other settlers came. One was a Vermont transplant, Gideon Putnam, who moved from Middlebury to Rutland and then to a leased three­hundred­acre tract near the springs. He immediately began logging the tall old­growth pines and transported them to the Hudson to sell in New York City. Another New England family settled nearby. A visitor, almost certainly Timothy Dwight of Yale University, came in 1791 to find “but three habitations and those poor log­houses.” Despite these wretched conditions, they were “al­ most full of strangers, among whom were several ladies and gentlemen from Albany.” Although he “found it almost impossible to obtain accom­ modations,” he was able to spend the night. The area remained a wilder­ ness: “for many miles” the tall pines extended, nothing but “perfect forest.” In time, more New Englanders came to settle.4 And so while Ballston Spa was the destination of a high­class clientele, Saratoga remained entirely a backwater. There were hints, though, that it might someday overtake Ballston among the many connoisseurs of min­ eral water. For example, Dr. Samuel Tenney’s 1793 analysis of the Saratoga waters called them a valuable resource and wondered why “the . . . physi­ cian, the chemist and the philosopher” had ignored them. To date, he mused, they had only “attract[ed] the notice, and excite[d] the admiration of the illiterate . . . the poorer sort of people.” There were two major prob­ lems, he felt. One was publicity—the springs needed “a suitable introduc­ tion to the world.” There was also the question of the accommodations and other facilities. Visitors needed “some convenient houses for boarding and lodging patients.”5 Saratoga also lacked, in effect, the social connections that had made Ballston so fashionable so quickly. Without that fashionable word of mouth, Saratoga would have been forever destined to be the poor man’s Ballston. But Saratoga was quietly improving, even as its reputation grew. For example, in 1795 Mitchill wrote a treatise on Saratoga Springs that was broadly excerpted in one of the more popular American books of the late eighteenth century, Jedidiah Morse’s American Geography. Over the next generation, other geographies and gazetteers reproduced items from [52.14.121.242...

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