The Springbank name endures
If this were the 1860s or 1870s, the imposing building in our old photo this week, at the top of that slope leading from Yates Street down to the bank of Twelve Mile Creek, would be populated at this time of year by vacationers and health seekers, enjoying a quiet and hopefully healing visit to St. Catharines.
That building was the Springbank Hotel, one of three major spa hotels that made this city a destination for many North Americans during the late 19th century. It was opened in 1865 by Dr. Theophilus Mack, a highly regarded local physician best known for having founded St. Catharines General and Marine Hospital during that same decade.
During the 1860s and 1870s the Springbank held its own with its two main rivals, the Stephenson House and the Welland House, but it went into decline after the death of Dr. Mack in 1881 and did not last out the decade.
Meanwhile, in the late 1880s a group of prominent Anglicans, including local businessman Thomas Rodman Merritt, were seeking to establish a new preparatory school for boys. Looking for a proper site for their fledgling institution they visited the vacant Springbank building and concluded that it would do very nicely. They purchased the property, recruited a faculty, and threw the doors open to the new school’s first class in the autumn of 1889. So began Ridley College.
The college soon got itself onto a firm footing there on Yates Street, and all was well through the 1890s and into the early 1900s. But then, three years into the new century, the massive old building was reduced to a burnt-out shell by a fire that broke out on Oct. 25, 1903. Suddenly Ridley College had to find a new home.
Fortunately just such a place was available to them a few blocks down Yates Street. There another former spa hotel, the Stephenson House, stood empty. DeMill Ladies College had just closed after almost a decade there at the corner of Yates and Salina streets.
While Ridley took that as a temporary home it devoted its attention to something that it had already begun a few years before the fire – the establishment of a permanent new home across
Twleve Mile Creek. With that well under way the school sold its Yates Street property to Newman Brothers.
The ruins of the old Springbank Hotel/Ridley College building were soon cleared away, the city opened up a new street — College Street — through the vacated Ridley property, and Newman Brothers soon began building up-scale houses along the new thoroughfare.
It was in 1909-10 that the Taylor family built the fine cut stone and stucco house that we see in our today photo this week, at 68 Yates St., corner of College. For the past several years the current owners of that property have opened their home to visitors as a B&B. With a nod toward Dr. Mack and his original spa hotel they call it the Springbank House B&B.