Belief in the curative powers of sulphur water shaped Sharon Springs for two centuries, tying the village, its people, buildings, and fortunes to the White Sulphur Spring. Local folklore holds that Native Americans first discovered its healing qualities, a view supported by arrowheads, pottery shards, and flint chips found nearby. In 1825, property owner David Eldridge began the springs’ first commercial use and built a boardinghouse for a growing clientele who arrived by canal boat to Palatine Bridge and then by stagecoach to Sharon Springs. Transportation improvements, including the Utica & Schenectady Railroad in 1830, later Delaware & Hudson Railroad service from New York City beginning in 1870, and bus service through the 1960s, helped sustain Sharon Springs as a resort. After Eldridge sold the land and springs in 1830 to New York City businessmen, they built the Pavilion Hotel, and under John Gardner’s sole proprietorship from 1841 the village entered a golden era of thriving business, major hotel construction, and flourishing social life as affluent Americans and wealthy foreign travelers came to take the waters. In the late 19th century, wealthy German Jewish visitors became an important part of the clientele as Saratoga Springs increasingly discriminated against Jews. By the 1920s, Jewish guests of Eastern European birth predominated, and in 1927 Henry Gardner built a new sulphur temple and the Imperial Baths, while in 1930 John Gardner organized the Sharon Springs Chamber of Commerce to attract Jewish tourists, leading Jewish businessmen to buy hotels and boardinghouses and operate them with entertainment and kosher kitchens. The fading Pavilion Hotel was demolished in 1941, and after the Gardners sold their remaining properties in 1954, Homer Spofford tried to revive the resort with the Spa Motel, but post-World War Two tourism trends, competition from Saratoga Springs, and the declining popularity of health resorts undermined revitalization. Thousands of Holocaust survivors, mostly Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish, came in the years after World War Two, but as that clientele aged and stricter codes burdened old hotels, many buildings were demolished, lost to fire, or abandoned. In the late 1970s, Spofford sold the White Sulphur Springs and Baths to the Yarkony family, and in the 1980s and 1990s Soviet immigrants from New York City became another summer clientele, drawn by mineral waters reminiscent of their homelands. By the end of the 20th century, historic preservation, restored buildings, new shops and accommodations, and an influx of year-round residents helped broaden the village’s economy, while the White Sulphur Spring continued to rise in the village and flow onward through Brimstone Creek, the Mohawk Valley, and to the Atlantic.