Nature
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The first recorded visitor to the sulphur springs grotto was Isaac Holmes, a retired U.S. Senator from South Carolina, who reportedly installed a bathtub in Bushy Dell canyon in the early 1860s so he could take alfresco baths for his rheumatism. Walter Blair later sought to capitalize on the water’s curative reputation after buying the park property; newspaper accounts said the springs contained sulphur, magnesia, iodine, and iron and were claimed by users to help rheumatism, neuralgia, dyspepsia, and kidney ailments. Blair bottled the mineral water and built a decorative gazebo over the spring where passersby could use a tin drinking cup. The gazebo appeared prominently in a photograph of Mark Twain circa 1869 during a lecture tour in San Francisco and on the cover of the prospectus for Piedmont Park tract in 1877. After Frank C. Havens bought the park property in the 1890s, he installed a new man-made faux stone grotto at the springs. A restoration project completed in 2007 to celebrate the city’s centennial incorporated remnants of Havens’s grotto.
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Piedmont, California · United States
