Poland Spring

by Richards, David L.

• ISBN13: 9781584654827
• ISBN10: 1584654821
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-05-03
• Publisher: Univ of New Hampshire

Summary

Between 1860 and 1900 the Ricker family's rustic frontier farm became the world-renowned summer community of Poland Spring, Maine, a middle landscape where upper-middle-class patrons and their urban values of status, leisure, and consumption confronted, flirted with, embraced and ultimately subsumed traditional, rural New England. First and foremost a cultural study, Poland Spring chronicles the rise of a nineteenth-century tourist mecca. By successfully linking its fortunes to the railroad and tourism, Poland Spring became home to both a classic manifestation of the magnificent Victorian summer hotel culture of the Northeast, the Poland Spring House, and to the legendary business that originated one of the most popular and enduring brands in the mineral water marketplace, the eponymous Poland Spring. This complex story represents a fascinating microcosm of the blossoming of the vacation trade and tourism in nineteenth-century New England, the emergence of the "springs" phenomenon, the development of entrepreneurialism into corporate capitalism, and the extension into the rural Northeast of the modern values that still predominantly shape the American cultural landscape. Scholars interested in regional, business, and tourism history as well as modernist studies will find much to admire in this progressive cultural history of the Gilded Age, to which historian David Richards brings impeccable scholarship and an energetic narrative style.

Author Biography

DAVID RICHARDS is Assistant Director of the Northwood University Margaret Chase Smith Library in Skowhegan, Maine. He earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of New Hampshire.

Table of Contents

Introduction: From Country Farm to Summer City	1	(4)
PART I: THE PEOPLE OF PROGRESS	5	(48)
Chapter 1: The Proprietors	9	(15)
Chapter 2: The Patrons	24	(29)
PART II: THE MASQUERADE OF ANTIMODERNITY	53	(84)
Chapter 3: The Mansion House: "A Noble Inheritance"	57	(22)
Chapter 4: The Poland Spring House: "Mecca of the Fashion, the Wealth and Culture of the Country"	79	(32)
Chapter 5: The Spring House: "The Ministry of Pure Water"	111	(26)
PART III: THE SEARCH FOR A MIDDLE LANDSCAPE: A CITY OF VIVID CONTRASTS	137	(102)
Chapter 6: The Farm: "Lovely Pastoral Country"	141	(25)
Chapter 7: The Grounds: "Out of a Country Farm an Eden"	166	(23)
Chapter 8: The Playing Fields: A Picturesque Recreational Landscape	189	(25)
Chapter 9: The Maine State Building: Toward an Urban Vision	214	(25)
Conclusion: Poland Spring in 1900	239	(4)
Appendixes	243	(6)
A. Ricker-Bolster Genealogy	244	(1)
B. Origins of Poland Spring Guests
Table 1. Origins of Poland Spring Guests by State	245	(1)
Table 2. Leading Points of Origin for Guests	246	(1)
Table 3. Origins of Guests by Size of Community	247	(1)
C. Population Trends in Poland and Surrounding Towns	248	(1)
Notes	249	(40)
Select Bibliography	289	(16)
Index	305