St. Louis had its own European-style mineral spa for more than 70 years
By Bryan A. Hollerbach
Even in these cosmopolitan times, the term “spa” still sounds exotic, conjuring mental images of the well-to-do “taking the waters.” Yet in the Belcher Bath House, St. Louis once had just such an establishment, primed by an artesian well sunk almost a half-mile into the earth—within strolling distance of Laclede’s Landing.
Under “Spas & Hot Tubs Dealers,” the Yellow Pages lists dozens of numbers, no doubt including more than one storefront nail parlor with delusions of grandeur. The establishment in question, though, operated at a different level altogether, as a spa in the truest sense of the word.
A website affiliated with The New York Times identifies “spa” as an acronym of sanus per aquam, meaning “health through water”—bad Latin mixed with worse etymology. Some believe the Emperor Nero used the term (variously spelled out as sanitas per aquas, senare per aqua and solus per aqua) for the ancient Roman baths. But what’s certain is that Spa was the name of a Belgian resort famed for its medicinal springs, and, in this context, it’s apt that “spa” comes from a country famed also for its chocolate. Why? Because the Belcher Bath House owed its birth to a sweet scheme gone sour.
The story began with what a monthly journal from 1848 called “the most extensive manufacturing establishment in our city.” If you guessed Anheuser-Busch, you’re all wet. The earliest ancestor of that Johnny-come-lately operation appeared a full decade after the 1840 opening of the manufacturer in question, the Belcher Sugar Refinery.
Despite predictable mishaps and machinations, the refinery prospered. It did so well, in fact, that its directors decided that the company should drill its own well. According to an 1857 account in The Transactions of the Academy of Science of St. Louis, drilling commenced in the spring of 1849 at Lewis and O’Fallon, due north of the Landing, and continued in fits and starts for 33 months. For its first 18 months, unthinkably, the project relied on manual labor alone. In September 1850, steam power entered the picture.
In mid-March of 1854, the project at last struck pay dirt—or, rather, water. The drill had reached a depth of 2,199 feet (three-and-a-half times the height of the Gateway Arch, which would rise more than a century later). Through 3-inch wrought-iron pipe lining the well’s first 456 feet, water at a constant 73.4 degrees Fahrenheit jetted forth at 75 gallons per minute. The cost? About $10,000. (The bill for a similar enterprise today would approach $225,000.)
Unfortunately, the water lacked the necessary refinement for sugar-making. Both figuratively and literally, it stank. Its total concentration of dissolved solids would have been almost 19 times the current recommended maximum, notes James E. Vandike, groundwater section chief with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. Certain of those solids would have made the water salty. A high concentration of “sulphuretted hydrogen” would have posed a bigger problem.
“I think today this constituent would be called hydrogen sulfide,” Vandike comments by e-mail. “It is a naturally occurring gas that imparts a distinct rotten-egg odor to water. Most people can smell it at levels below 1 milligram per liter.” With a concentration of the substance at 14 milligrams per liter, the well’s flow undoubtedly reeked—and so, instead of being used to refine sugar, it was allowed to run into the gutter.
The well’s story might have ended there, but for the vagaries of human nature. From the 1880s to the 1920s, a craze for mineral water swept Missouri. During that time, notes a report for the Department of Natural Resources, more than 80 mineral-water spas arose, mostly in the state’s western and central areas. At one point around a century ago, some of Missouri’s mineral water was celebrated for containing, of all things, radium. By comparison, the noxious sulfur seemed merely a homespun cure, and sulfur baths had long been used to treat everything from acne to arthritis.
“Though entirely useless for the purposes of the Refinery,” the Transactions report had observed, “it is much used as a medicinal water, and, by some, is visited daily; and, by others, conveyed, in jugs and barrels, to their dwellings, and used for its remedial virtues.”
The state’s spa craze hit St. Louis in 1894, when a local physician reportedly formed a company to build a bathhouse over the Belcher well. By 1899, people were referring with awe to “Belcher water.” In 1903, the Belcher Bath House—later known as the Belcher Bath Hotel and the Belcher Health Club—was erected on the northwest corner of Fourth and Lucas. The warm sulfurous water was piped three-fourths of a mile southwest to accommodate the spa-goers.
To modern readers, all of this may seem a tempest in a tub. But before the world became a whirl of Kohler and Jacuzzi—before Moen and Hansgrohe became fixtures in the average bathroom, in fact before bathrooms became fixtures in most homes—not everyone enjoyed what the British poet Rupert Brooke called the “benison of hot water.” For St. Louisans concerned with personal hygiene, the period preceding World War I may have seemed less the Belle Époque than an epic bellyache. “In the alley houses, where a quarter of the population lived, there was one bath for each 2,479 residents,” reports a 1989 article in Gateway Heritage—and so the Belcher thrived.
“You would’ve enjoyed being down there,” Claude J. Bell tells me. In the early 1940s, he worked at the Belcher as a masseur, a position he still holds at the Original Springs Hotel in Okawville, Ill. Bell, who turned 94 in March, reminisces with fondness about the spa at Fourth and Lucas, effortlessly rattling off the specific days of the week on which regulars visited.
“The bathhouse was marble, all marble—the walls, the floors and everything,” he says. He sketches patrons’ progress through the Belcher once they soaked in its basement tubs: “They’d go into a steam room—live steam—and next to it was a hot room, dry heat. And then you’d give ’em a massage, and they’d go back up to the second floor, what we called the cooling room. It didn’t have air conditioning, but it was cool up there, with the fans, and they would lay up there and sleep or sober up.”
At that time, the Belcher ran two shifts and devoted one side (only during the week) to women. Regulars on the men’s side included doctors and clerics, policemen and politicos, athletes ranging from legendary Cardinals shortstop Leo Durocher to somewhat less legendary wrestlers such as Alabama the Turbaned Turk. Real-estate agents also treasured the Belcher. “There were more deals made in a corner down there on real estate than anywhere in the world,” says Bell with a laugh.
One assumes his tips kept pace with business? “If a man gave you a quarter, you would thank him,” Bell says. “If he gave you 50 cents, when he came back, you’d hug him.”
All crazes ultimately ebb, of course, and from the heyday of Missouri’s mineral-water meccas, today only the Hall of Waters at Excelsior Springs, outside Kansas City, remains. Indoor plumbing and modern pharmacology conspired with changing tastes to shutter such operations.
For the Belcher, roadwork also played a part. The construction of Interstate 70 spelled the end for the bathhouse by rupturing the pipeline from the well. “They tried to keep it open by trucking the water in,” recalls Bell, “but you couldn’t do it—couldn’t get enough water.” The bathhouse finally folded in the 1970s.
As he remembers his tenure at the Belcher, sadness tinges Bell’s voice. “I wish I knew of somebody else that was alive,” he says. “I’m the only one that I know of.”
Neglect shrouds the well’s old neighborhood: Weathered brick hulks stand vacant, their doors and windows barricaded, their loading docks corroded and crumbling. To the southwest—in a section of the city dominated by shrines to finance and temples of corporate sports—a multistory garage long ago replaced the Belcher Bath House.
It’s tempting to speculate about a resurgence of interest in establishments such as the Belcher. The combination of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, elegant in its simplicity, retains its healing properties and near-cultic following, and St. Louis still sits atop a mineral-rich interface between wellsprings of fresh and saline water that arches across Missouri from Jasper County in the west to Perry County in the east. But just drilling a well would cost a sizable sum, even without the expense of an environmental-impact assessment or two and a bale of permits that undoubtedly weren’t required when Zachary Taylor occupied the White House. Claude Bell’s memories are, in all likelihood, the final echoes of the glory days of the Belcher Bath House.
