Abita Springs, Land of Healing Waters
In the late 19th, early 20th centuries—travelers raced to the hottest spot in health tourism
Approaching Abita Springs from any direction, you can’t help but notice the pines. The town is nestled among them. They stand as straight as telephone poles, some twice as tall. It was those pines, and the fresh air, and especially the bubbling springs that for generations drew countless New Orleanians to the Northshore. Beneath much of St. Tammany Parish lies an artesian aquifer, but more than any other water in the region, Abita’s was known to heal the sick.
All throughout the nineteenth-century, and into the twentieth, New Orleans battled a yearly outbreak of yellow fever. From 1817 (the beginning of reliable statistics) until 1905 (the year of the last epidemic) at least 41,000 people died in New Orleans from yellow fever alone. That doesn’t count all the deaths from malaria, influenza, cholera, smallpox, and other nameless ailments that perennially plagued the city. It got so bad that the sensationalist press began to call New Orleans the “Necropolis of the South.” People with the means to travel were desperate for a safe place to go for treatment or just to get away from crowds.
[Read this: The Saffron Scourge in New Orleans—one hundred years of pestilence.]
And then on September 24, 1881, the St. Tammany Farmer ran a poem in its pages called “The Legend of Abita,” penned by the “talented young authoress ‘Rehnle,’” as they put it, whose identity remains a mystery to this day. Hence a legend was born.
“The Legend of Abita” tells the story of a young New Orleanian called Henriquez, “of noble Spanish birth,” who visits a Choctaw village on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, where he meets Abita, the daughter of a chief, and sweeps her off her feet. The couple marries and the groom takes his bride back to the Crescent City. But her health soon declines. She is sure to die but for an intervention by a “Medicine Man” who commands Abita to return to the healing waters across the lake. She obeys and is miraculously healed. The villagers “viewed the spring with wondrous awe and pride, and named it for the Indian girl.”
The authenticity of the story is still in dispute, and indeed others say the name “Abita” is actually derived from the Choctaw word “ibetap,” which roughly means “water source.” By the time the poem appeared, the Choctaws were long gone, pushed northwest to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) after the 1830 Indian Removal Act. The poem, whether historically accurate or not, answered a need for such a refuge in the area, and helped turn Abita Springs into a tourist destination.
The settlement that later grew into the town began in earnest after 1853, when Captain Joseph St. Auge Bossiere purchased from the government the land on both sides of the Abita River, and later built a few houses. The other big investor was one Colonel William Christy, who tapped into the springs and named them after himself. For a long time, people referred to the place as Christy Springs.
Development from there came in waves. The first major hotel, the Longbranch, was built even before the poem appeared, in the winter of 1879 and in 1880, boasting of sixteen luxury rooms and other quarters besides. More hotels and boarding houses followed. Private wells were dug behind the hotels and homes, and the town built a public fountain at its center. A boom was underway, but transportation was still a challenge.
At forty-odd miles due north of New Orleans, it was much farther around the lake, and in those days roads were in pitiful shape. Still, some people came by horse and buggy. But steamboats were faster and more comfortable than a wagon, and could carry dozens of travelers at a time. A steamer route was established to connect the north shore with the south, serviced by the Susquehanna and the New Camelia. The latter charged fifty cents one way during the week and fifty cents round-trip on weekends. The trip took two and a half hours, and on board, there was food and music and dancing. Passengers would disembark and take horse-drawn “omnibus” wagons, and later gas powered streetcars, into town. And if boats didn’t suit the traveler, in 1887, the East Louisiana Railroad laid the first tracks directly from Abita Springs from New Orleans, offering regular passage to and fro.
A healing water bonanza had begun. A.L. Metz, a chemist from the Louisiana Board of Health and Tulane University, tested the water and declared it “of superior quality from a sanitary and hygienic point of view.” Ads ran in newspapers urging people to come stay for a while. But not everyone could make the trip, and thus the Abita Spring Water Co. Ltd., a company out of New Orleans run by an ambitious Mr. Edwin J. Larkin, bottled Abita’s water and distributed it to the masses. The company also sold “syrups” and “extracts.”
At its height, Abita Springs hosted about two thousand summer residents a year, with every boarding house and hotel full. The peak of “health tourism” was around 1920, said John Preble, amateur historian, artist, and proprietor of the Abita Springs Hotel and the indescribable, interactive art space known as the Abita Mystery House. “Doctors would send people here with tuberculosis and things like that. Many houses were built with large porches so if they were in a wheelchair they could accommodate the wheelchairs, and even beds, out on the porch during the day.”
Called “convalescing porches,” these typically wrapped around three sides. It’s a unique architecture feature to the town, said Mary Davis, the first director and curator of the Abita Springs Trailhead Museum, where much of this history is laid out. The museum is housed in an old bachelor quarters building that once formed part of the famous Longbranch Hotel. There were seven hotels at one time, nearly all of which have burned in various fires over the years.
The decline in health tourism was gradual, Davis explained, beginning with New Orleans solving its yellow fever problem. The invention of automobiles and the subsequent development of the highway system were other major factors, which gave New Orleanians cheap and easy access to the Gulf Coast and beyond.
Over the years the town got even quieter. Many springs were capped off, or run dry, and those that remain are privately owned, with the exception of a public fountain, which pumps out the town’s treated water. Still today, the town is lovely and quaint, and there remains a steady stream of visitors seeking serenity and fresh air.
[Read this: Holistic Approach—Two New Orleans women practice alternative pathways to healing.]
Davis and Preble both were part of an influx of newcomers in the 1970s, when artists and culture makers took advantage of cheap properties and came to build a community that reflected their dreams. New shops opened and art was made. The old railroad tracks were converted into thirty-one miles of bicycle trails and dubbed the Tammany Trace. The Piney Woods Opry was founded, and later the Abita Springs Opry took its place. The town reinvented itself.
Another advantage of living in Abita, Preble shared, is that the temperature there is always cooler than in New Orleans. Perhaps it’s the trees. Preble’s boutique Abita Springs Hotel is newly renovated, the only functioning hotel left. In the garden, surrounded by leafy banana trees, sits a small private spring-fed pool. “The water comes out five gallons a minute,” Preble said. “It’s like a big hot tub, but it’s always seventy degrees. In the winter it’s warm, and in the summer it’s cold.”
Health tourism hasn’t disappeared. If anything, it’s on the rise. One finds ample online “listicles” touting health resorts and spas and yoga and nature retreats the world round. We’ve got health on our minds now more than ever. Sometimes though, all you need to set your spirits aright is a short drive out in the country, a decent poboy and beer, and a walk through majestic woods.