The curative waters of the local mineral spring was first noticed in the late 1700s, and in 1829 the first visitors arrived from out of province, with local farmhouses providing accommodations to summer visitors.[2] The Spa Springs Hotel opened in 1831 and in August that year a vessel brought visitors from Maine.[3] At around the same time a bath house was in use.[4] The hotel was expanded and modernized in the 1880s,[5] but destroyed by fire in 1889. This prompted the owner to build a bottling plant to manufacture ginger ale and other aerated drinks.[6][7] In 1890 the Wilmot Spa Springs Company took over the enterprise.[8][note 1] Another hotel opened in 1892, but not on the grand scale of the earlier one. Its last visitors were in 1901.[9] The hotel register, now in the care of the Nova Scotia Archives,[10] lists many notable guests including Samuel Cunard, Robert Borden, Joseph Howe and Prince George of Wales.[11]
The bottling plant was destroyed by fire in 1908,[11] and little happened until 1984 when the Mineral Water Company of Canada purchased the site and built a $5.8 million bottling plant, but it struggled financially and closed in 1992.[12] The plant was purchased and renovated in 2009 and now operates as Spa Springs Mineral Water Company.[13]
^Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts (1891). The Canadian Guide-book: The Tourist's and Sportsman's Guide to Eastern Canada and Newfoundland. D. Appleton. p. 258. Retrieved 16 March 2018. There is a summer hotel at the springs - though just at the moment of writing it happens to be burned down; and good lodgings may be obtained at private houses in the neighbourhood. The waters of the spring are growing rapidly in repute, and a delicious, sparkling ginger ale is manufactured from them. They have a great medicinal value, and taste much less like a combination of old shoes and burnt gunpowder than such waters usually do.
