Nov. 12, 2009 - City engineers searched Marlin in the early 1890s, digging deep into the rich Blackland dirt looking for water. What they got was a torrent of hot, mineral-laden water gushing up from deep in the ground. It was an ugly yellow color, smelled bad and tasted worse. The engineers were disappointed and the people of Marlin were still thirsty.
Not long after that, a young man described as "sick and despairing" and suffering from a "loathsome disease" entered the offices of the Marlin Democrat newspaper and enlisted the sympathy of the paper and the town. The townspeople, perhaps looking for a guinea pig, supplied the man with a barrel of that hot, sulfur-laden yellow water. He bathed himself in it, and five weeks later, he was proclaimed healed. The nasty water, once so held in disdain, turned out to be the town's ticket to fame and riches.
Before you could say "day spa," Marlin became one of the country's hottest health destination points.
Similar stories played out elsewhere in the state during the 1800s and well into the 20th Century. In Lampasas County, Moses Hughes brought his ailing wife to the springs near the city because he knew the local tribes believed in the water's healing qualities. She "took the waters" and began a remarkable and lasting recovery. Like Marlin, Lampasas did a booming business with its natural mineral water for many years.
The city that benefited the most from its mineral water was the aptly-named city of Mineral Wells in Palo Pinto County. J.A. Lynch drilled a well there in 1880, and brought up a lot of foul-smelling water. His wife decided to try some and, lo, her rheumatism went away.
A year later, Billy Wiggins drilled not far from Lynch's well and hit what came to be called the Crazy Well. Why it was called that isn't clear, but the water contained significant amounts of lithium, which is widely used today in the treatment of Bipolar Disorder. Crazy Water became the most famous water in America since firewater.
By the early 1890s, Mineral Wells had more than 400 commercial wells in operation. By 1910, the city attracted more than 150,000 visitors a year; it required 46 hotels and boarding houses to accommodate them all. In the 1920s, brothers Carr P. and Hal Collins reopened the new Crazy Water Hotel as a posh resort. The Baker Hotel opened its own resort, one even larger than the Crazy Water spa. On any given day during Mineral Wells' heyday you might have spotted Will Rogers, Tom Mix, Clark Gable, Jack Dempsey or even the Three Stooges strolling the streets and taking the waters.
As the Depression deepened in the 1930s, Carr hit on the idea of selling Crazy Water Crystals, the dehydrated minerals from the Crazy Water. The whole country heard about the Crystals via the Crazy Water Crystals Radio Show, which was broadcast coast to coast over the Mutual Network.
The Crazy Water Crystals were packed in small, green boxes that featured a picture of the Crazy Hotel and instructions to "put one or two teaspoons in a glass of water and drink the mixture down." The radio show's commercials boasted that the crystals cured ailments brought on by "constipation, high blood pressure, rheumatism, arthritis, liver and kidney troubles, autointoxication, bad complexion, excess acidity or something else of a more serious nature."
While some crusaders were calling for government regulation of extravagant health claims about the crystals and other products, sales of the Crazy Water Crystals exceeded $3 million in the early 1930s, the heart of the Great Depression.
An exhibit at the 1933 World's Fair, designed to promote the Pure Food and Drug Act, paraded a long line of medicinal and cosmetic products and some sobering before-and-after photographs as well. Included in this little shop of horrors was a box of Crazy Water Crystals.
Carr Collins, using his considerable influence, was able to get the Crazy Water Crystals removed from the exhibit but the Pure Food and Drug Act became the law of the land. The Collins brothers took their radio show south of the border out of what was probably a well-grounded fear that the Food and Drug Administration would pressure the FCC to pull the plug on the Crazy Water Crystals show.
Modern medicines, including sulfa drugs that use the medicinal qualities of sulfur, along with the Depression and the Pure Food and Drug Act combined to put most of the mineral water spas out of business. Of the 425 such spas in the United States in 1927, almost 90 percent of them were gone by 1943.
