Historic Poland Spring
Maine State Archives
During the Gilded Age, members of the “leisure class” often made Maine a summer destination. Coastal and lake communities became hot spots for these vacationers, and one of the most celebrated of these was the Poland Spring Resort, which, at its peak, was a gated, sprawling complex that could accommodate hundreds of guests.
But long before the resort’s heyday, it had humble beginnings. In 1794, the Ricker family was farming their property when they began taking in travelers who would stop looking for a place to spend the night. Recognizing an opportunity when they saw it, the family built the Wentworth Ricker Inn and opened it in 1797.
While the Wentworth did a decent business, it was the third generation of Rickers that made it into the renowned resort of the Gilded Age. The story goes that in 1844, Hiram Ricker, who had suffered from chronic indigestion, was cured after only drinking water from a spring on the property over the course of ten days while overseeing work on the farm. The spring had a quiet history of restoring health, but Hiram Ricker capitalized it, marketing the resort not just as a place to get away and enjoy leisure activities but as a retreat with health benefits. The idea took off, and when the Rickers began bottling the water from their spring, Poland Spring Natural Water became an internationally recognized brand.
By 1876, the family had opened the massive Poland Spring House, a grand hotel that, over time, grew to include more than 350 guest rooms, a barber shop, dance and photography studios, pool room, music hall, bowling alley, dining facilities, elevators, and even a fire sprinkler system. By the middle of the twentieth century, the campus encompassed 5,000 acres, a bottling plant, a chapel, the Maine State Building from the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and a golf course.
However, the Ricker family’s fortunes changed. The Great Depression and changing travel habits, particularly the rise of automobile tourism, resulted in the property changing hands several times over the remaining decades of the twentieth century, and in 1975, the grand Poland Spring House was lost to a fire.
The Poland Spring water brand retains a national reputation, although it is no longer locally owned and the water comes from multiple sources in Maine rather than solely from the original spring at the resort.
Today, many of the remaining historic buildings of the once-sprawling campus are individually and collectively on the National Register of Historic Places, and the resort still operates – although on a much smaller scale than at its height – with an inn, cottages, and the golf course still drawing seasonal visitors, along with wedding parties and other celebrants.
Author: Stephanie Bouchard
