There is no mystery about the name Carlisle Springs, and no research is required to learn its origin. What other name would anyone give to a sulphur spring of medicinal properties located only five miles from the county seat of Cumberland County? What is of special interest, however, is that Carlisle Springs was one of many springs, baths, and spas that flourished as popular resorts for health and recreation in the United States in the second third of the nineteenth century.
In the decades before the American Revolution such watering places attracted a number of the leisured well-to-do. As early as the 1740s physicians inquired into the properties of the sulphur springs of Virginia; in the 1760s some doctors sent their patients to Harrowgate or Bristol, near Philadelphia, to drink the waters, bathe, and rest; while Newport in Rhode Island drew a cosmopolitan company fleeing the heat and fevers of Philadelphia, the Tidewater, and Charleston. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Baltimoreans came in numbers to York Springs (in Adams County), whose chalybeate waters had been discovered a few years before.
In 1831 Dr. John Bell, a prominent Philadelphia physician, published a book on the efficacy of thermal waters; and in a survey some twenty years later he described American and Canadian springs. A number of these were in Pennsylvania-Bedford Springs, Cambridge Springs, Ephrata Mountain Springs, among others-· and two were in Cumberland County-Doubling Gap and Carlisle Springs. The latter was the better known.
As early as 1792 William Ramsey acquired the land on which the springs rise, one mildly sulphureous, the other iron; and in 1830, responding to the growing medical acceptance and social appeal of spas, Ramsey erected a two-story frame building as a boarding house for visitors. He also installed a stone basin into which the sulphur spring water flowed. As the fame of Carlisle Springs spread, its waters came into demand elsewhere, and Ramsey bottled them for shipment and sale. Operation of the hotel appears to have been leased to a neighbor Jacob Weibley and Henry Hockett. Upon Ramsey's death in 1832, 21 acres were sold to another landowner in Carlisle Springs, David Cornman, for $1530. In 1841 he paid a tax of $150 on the spring house.
In 1852 Anson P. Norton and Morris Owen of New York purchased the 21 acres and another piece from Cornman for $4000, and in 1853-54 the partners built a new hotel. Larger and more luxurious than the original structure, with four stories and a cupola "surrounded by porticos and balconies," it had accommodations for 200 boarders. These guests were assured a "full view of the Picturesque Scenery of the Blue Mountains, half a mile distant," and, as advertising handbills promised, in addition to drinking and bathing in the waters, they might stroll over the extensive lawns, walk through the neighboring woods, and dance to music at night. For the men the hotel provided a bowling alley, and there was fishing nearby. Horses and carriages were available for jaunts into the countryside, the limestone cave in the bank of the Condoguinet being particularly recommended.
Commander (as he then was) Charles Wilkes, U.S.N. (1798- 1877) travelled through Cumberland County to Harrisburg in August 1844. He described the towns and countryside he passed through, noted institutions like churches and the county jail, and passed ten days in Carlisle, where he was agreeably entertained by the gentry and by officers at Carlisle Barracks.