Still Waters: Stories from The Elms Hotel & Spa Archive

A guest letter from The Elms at the height of its resort years. The writer has been here nearly two weeks, has taken the waters, and has become a believer.

 

This is the hotel doing exactly what it promised.

 

 

My dear Frances,

 

I have now been at Excelsior Springs for nearly two weeks and I begin to think I have not appreciated it at all until this last week, which is I suppose the usual way of it. The first days one is settling and taking stock and forming impressions, and it is only when one has been still long enough that the place begins to have its effect.

 

The hotel is very fine — much finer than I had been led to expect, though I cannot think why I had been led to expect anything less. The building is the old style, broad verandas all around, the kind that was built for people who intended to spend a good deal of time sitting and looking at things. The grounds are beautifully kept. There is a formal garden to the south, a path along the bluff, and the lawn comes quite close to the bath house, so that one can sit outside in the mornings before the day grows warm.

 

The waters are the reason one comes, and I will say that I came with some skepticism and leave with considerably less. I have taken the mineral spring water twice daily and have bathed three times in the therapeutic baths, and while I will not make an extravagant claim, I will say that I sleep better than I have slept in some years and that the persistent trouble I had with my side has been, if not resolved, considerably quieted. The attendant is a very capable woman named Mrs. Vance who has worked the bath house for eight years and who answers questions directly and without embellishment, which I find very reassuring.

 

The other guests are pleasant. This is not always the case at a resort, I find, but the waters seem to select for a certain temperament — people who have come because they need something, which puts them in a cooperative frame of mind. There is a family from Chicago who have been coming for three years. There are a number of people from Kansas City and St. Louis. There is a very old man from New Orleans who takes the waters every morning and plays cards in the parlour every afternoon and who, I have been told, has been coming here for the same purpose and in the same order for eleven consecutive years.

 

I believe in the waters. I did not come here believing in them and I leave believing in them, or perhaps I believe in sitting still and drinking something mineral and being left alone to recover at whatever pace suits me. Either way, I intend to come back.

 

I hope you are well. I hope you will consider coming next summer.

 

Yours affectionately,

 

H.

 

The Elms Hotel, Excelsior Springs

 

Friday, the 14th