Travelers Rediscover Hotel With Mineral Baths

The paint is dingy and flaking, the carpet is thin, the decor is dated. But the Original Springs Hotel, “the last spa on the prairie,” is springing back from a dry spell.

“We think this is an idea whose time has come again,” said Linda Kaat, one of the new owners, from a wicker chair on the hotel’s long, curving front porch.

The 56-room landmark was built in 1867. For more than a century, visitors from across the nation came to try the supposedly restorative powers of its natural mineral spring, the full-body massages that went with them, and the charm of the hotel itself.

To the weary wayfarers of the 1920s and ‘30s, the hotel’s heyday, said Kaat, “this was the remedy for a hectic pace--a mineral bath and a masseuse.”

Linda Kaat and her friends Don and Mary Rennegarbe, all Okawville natives, bought the three-story brick and frame building in May from longtime proprietors Ab and Doris Krohne.

“There is so much charm here that just has to be cleaned up and exposed,” Kaat said. The hotel’s architecture, its wide hallways and high ceilings, helped put it on the National Register of Historic Places.

“It is really the last spa on the prairie,” she said.

On the Illinois prairie, anyway. According to the Illinois Department of Tourism, the Original Springs Hotel was the last of several spas built in the state around the turn of the century. In those days, the Okawville area was something of an oasis.

Today, guests fill the hotel on weekends, despite its yellowed linoleum and exposed pipes in the bathing areas. They come for the mind-calming 20-minute soaks in the sweet-scented mineral spring whirlpool baths and the 30-minute Swedish massages.

Okawville, population 1,300, is 25 miles east of St. Louis and just off Interstate 64.

Local patrons come in for once-a-week rubdowns, said head masseur John MacMiller. The massages are the biggest draw, he said.

MacMiller has kneaded hands, backs and feet in the steamy men’s bathhouse for 22 years. One of his customers, he said, was Lyndon B. Johnson, then vice president. MacMiller said that many of his clients have high-stress jobs. Besides relaxing them, he says, massage helps circulation and digestion.

“They are like putty in my hands,” said MacMiller. “They come out like wet noodles.”

Mount Vernon resident Marvin Lynn is one who travels the 25 miles to Okawville regularly. He says he has patronized the baths for 51 of his 73 years.

“I first started coming when it was wintertime. You took the mineral baths to keep away colds and stop rheumatism,” Lynn recalled as he soaked in a steamy, bubbling bath. “I remember when I was a kid, doctors would come here. Even they believed it would work.”

Brochures from the 1940s name 14 minerals in the spa water, including iron, calcium, magnesium and sulfate, all touted to be good for what ails you.

Inside and out. The hotel bottles nearly 700 gallons of spring water daily. Local lore has it that morning water is best for drinking, so it is bottled between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. Unless guests specify otherwise, they also get the mineral water in mixed drinks at the bar.

Linda Kaat said that local demand for the water has boomed lately. When word reached Okawville that a climatologist in New Mexico had predicted that the chance of an earthquake in this area in early December were better than usual, people began storing the spring water for emergency supplies.

Kaat and the Rennegarbes said they will go slowly in making changes to the hotel, which was last renovated in the 1960s.