Pampering people at Preston Springs
A favourite subject of Flash from the Past returns this week — this time, the “inside” story.
Preston Springs Hotel remains the community’s landmark, some two decades after it closed. Several owners and numerous proposals have come and gone during those years, but in 2018 the structure which dominates the King Street/Fountain Street intersection in Cambridge-Preston remains a shell — a ghost, if you like.
During its heyday as a health spa, between 1888 and 1940 and even until its mid-1990s demise as a retirement and care facility, the building provided Prestonians with a sense of pride. It remains the last of three large hotels that once overlooked the corner. The North American Hotel fronting on King began in the 1840s, was expanded in 1900 and became the Kress Hotel. Beside it, the Sulphur Springs Hotel was built in the mid-1890s.
Preston Springs Hotel, facing Fountain, began life in 1888 as the Del Monte Hotel, named after a famous resort in Monterey, California, that owner Robert Walder had visited and admired. Five acres of beautifully landscaped grounds with colourful gardens, immaculate lawns and romantic vistas gave visitors a relaxing environment to complement the mineral baths in the hotel’s basement. It was those baths which proved the major attraction. People came from all over Canada and the United States to be pampered and “cleansed.”
After Walder sold the Del Monte in 1903, decline began and the First World War temporarily terminated this life of luxury. In the 1920s and 1930s, two Hespeler brothers, doctors living in Kitchener, operated the renamed Pres- ton Springs while it was owned by A.R. Kaufman.
Edwin and Gordon Hagmeier offered a wide variety of services to wealthy clients. There was hardly a body part for which the Hagmeiers and their medical staff didn’t offer treatments using X-rays, hydrotherapy, electric light baths, electrotherapy, surgery and physiotherapy. If you suffered from nervous, urinary, gastrointestinal, respiratory, dental or circulatory problems, Preston Springs Sanitarium (as it was also called) offered solutions, some of which, as Gordon Hagmeier admitted late in life, were “smoke and mirrors.”
Even during the Depression years, wealthy clients kept the doctors and nurses busy, with up to 100 hotel clients and 50 patients registered at the clinic at any one time. However, there were certain provisos: no mental cases, no tubercular patients, no contagious people and no incurables were admitted. In fact, a brochure proudly stated: “No Invalids in wheelchairs; no Long Faces.”
There are lots of photos of the exterior of the Preston Springs Hotel, but here we see what the clientele saw inside the walls in 1935. The top two postcards put us in the “Rotunda,” which was the main lobby. Fancy carpets, padded chairs, bright electric lighting and a cosy fireplace made you feel welcome even before registering.
Once in your bedroom, finely crafted furniture filled your room-with-a-view. A modernistic bed lamp, a telephone on the side table, fresh flowers and heatthrowing hot water radiators conveyed comfort. When treatments, lawn croquet, meals or mineral bathing weren’t what you wanted, the lounge offered a quiet corner.
Who among us doesn’t hope that, someday, some traces of these luxurious interiors might return to Preston Springs?
Linda Revie’s 2004 paper on Preston Springs in the Waterloo Historical Society’s annual volume 92 provided much of the information above. Also valuable was Paul Langan’s c. 2000 book, “The Miracle in Preston.” The postcards with white captions were published in 1935 by J.E. Evans of Port Rowan. The lounge view was anonymously published. All are from the author’s collection.