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"Taking the cure" was all the rage when spring water was "man's first medicine," and others hadn't been invented. Along came biotics and antibiotics, and spas became ghost towns. But not for long Somebody started a swing back to Mother Nature You ate natural food, joined a gym, jogged at dawn. A new generation dashed for the spas. Today they're more popular than ever. "Taking the cure" never had it so good.
-The Spring, a brochure published by Mountain Valley Water (1985)1
AS ITS NAME IMPLIES, HOT SPRINGS, ARKANSAS, is a city renowned for a somewhat unusual geological quirk. Natural springs bubble up in the area, and they seem to have drawn humans to the region long before recorded history. Historian Dee Brown helped spread a powerful and popular legend when he stated that American Indian groups came for sweatbaths, believing so much in the area's healthfulness that they made the valley a neutral ground, permanently burying "the war hatchet . . . between the green mountains." That same vein of folklore suggests Hernando de Soto surveyed the springs in 1541 and noted those healthful features with amazement. Euro-Americans settled the area in the nineteenth century, and, in 1832, President Andrew Jackson signed into law an act that preserved the area as federal land-the springs were seemingly too important to be owned by any private citizen.2 Near these springs, the Mountain Valley Spring Water Company, the nation's first firm to sell bottled water coast-to-coast, was born in 1871.
Mountain Valley leveraged its spring water's putative natural purity as a core advertising strategy not only because it believed in the water's health benefits, but, more importantly, because doing so represented a prescription for a healthy bottom line. In this case, the profit motive caused a business to value natural purity (or at least the perception of it), work to preserve that purity, and adopt reverence of the natural world as a company identity to be advertised to the public. Marketing unadulterated spring water as good for the body was, thus, also good for business.3 Hot Springs developed a significant reputation for being a healthy place because of its natural spring waters, and Mountain Valley tapped into that perception. In doing so, however, like many individuals and...