Manitou Springs

Soda Spring and the Ute Pass Trail

A three-story Spanish Colonial Revival building, built in 1920, stands over Soda Spring on the north bank of Fountain Creek in downtown Manitou Springs.⁴ The Cheyenne, Arapahoes, Utes, and others regarded the springs as sacred places inhabited by the Great Spirit, and the Ute Pass hunting trail ended there.³ The 1941 Writers’ Program guide adds that the Indians marked off the ground around the springs as a sanctuary, and that the neutral ground is said never to have been violated.² According to the same guide, Frémont stopped at the springs in 1843 and analyzed the waters, which for a time were known as Fremont Soda Springs.² In 1858 Julia Archibald Holmes camped near the springs with her husband and brother as members of the Lawrence Party, and she wrote that they “drank deeply from these Saratogas of the wilderness.”⁷

From Villa la Font to Manitou

In 1871 William Jackson Palmer and William Bell began developing the area as a health resort, and their Colorado Springs Company hired the Chicago landscape architect John Blair to design the town.⁴ The town’s first hotel, the Manitou House, opened in 1872, the same year a rustic log pavilion went up near Soda Spring.⁴ The 1941 guide says Dr. William A. Bell and General William Palmer founded the town in 1872, while the National Register nomination dates its founding to 1876, when the Colorado Springs Company platted it.^2,5,8 The guide says the name was changed to Manitou when a resort hotel was opened, then to Manitou Springs in 1912, when, in the guide’s words, the town enjoyed its greatest popularity.² The guide also notes that three of the developed springs each claimed to be the original Manitou Spring for which the community was named.²

Hotels, Panics, and the Cog Road

Bell and Palmer built the Mansions Hotel in 1874 as the town’s third hotel, and after an 1875 renovation it offered Brussels carpets, mahogany furniture, and hot and cold running water on each floor.¹ Its guests included General William Tecumseh Sherman and Buffalo Bill Cody.¹ The Colorado Encyclopedia says the Panic of 1873 slowed development, while the National Register nomination names the panic of 1874, compounded by three seasons of grasshoppers that had devastated local agriculture.^4,8 A railroad spur from Colorado Springs then brought new visitors and investors, in 1880 by the encyclopedia’s date and in 1881 by the nomination’s, which credits the D & R G.^4,8 Hordes of health seekers suffering from tuberculosis and other maladies followed, among them Emma, ill since age seven, who moved from Massachusetts with her mother around 1889 in the hope that the springs and mountain air might cure an illness presumed to be tuberculosis.^4,6 Jerome B. Wheeler built the town’s first bank in 1888-1889, a three-story block with Wheeler Hall, the town’s first true opera house, on the third floor.⁹ In 1889 the Manitou Mineral Water Company, with Wheeler as its president, built a three-story bottling plant downtown that produced up to 20,000 bottles a day.¹⁰ The Manitou and Pike’s Peak Railway was completed in August 1891, and a marker presented to the city in 1940 gives its roadway as 9 miles long, with grades up to 25%, reaching 14109 feet.¹¹ During the 1893 Silver Panic the Wheeler Banking Company defaulted, and after 1900 its building became a small hotel.⁹

The Last Bathhouse

In the early twentieth century health tourism began to decline; the town faced competition from Colorado Springs, which became the area’s main center for tuberculosis treatment, and the use of mineral springs for health faded as drugs, vitamins, and minerals began to take hold.⁴ In 1920 the old pavilion at Soda Spring was torn down for the Spa Building, fitted out under the bathhouse expert John Fordyce with shops on the first floor, baths on the second, and rooms on the third.³ The Colorado Encyclopedia calls it the town’s last attempt to market mineral baths as a commercial venture.⁴ After two fires the Mansions Hotel was torn down in 1925, and during the Great Depression the Civilian Conservation Corps set up headquarters in its old spring pavilion, now City Hall.¹ The post office, dedicated in 1940, was the last building in town built of Manitou greenstone, which was quarried locally from about 1890 to 1940.¹² In 1941 the Writers’ Program guide counted 1,205 people and found that the town hibernated from October to June, when most hotels and shops were closed.² At mid-century the automobile brought motels to the town’s eastern edge, and most of the large old resorts downtown were demolished.⁴

The District on Fountain Creek

The Manitou Springs Historic District, on the National Register since 1983, covers almost the entire city, and 752 of its approximately 1001 buildings count as contributing.^1,13 Its buildings date from 1876 to the 1930s, among them Miramont Castle, built in 1895 by the Gillis Brothers, contractors.⁵ The Spa Building was vacated in 1999, sold to development partners in 2005, and now houses shops and restaurants on the ground floor and condominiums above.⁴ Most of the town’s springs, long neglected, have been restored by the Mineral Springs Foundation, an all-volunteer non-profit.¹⁴ Manitou Soda Spring still sits at the center of the Spa Building’s first-floor rotunda.³