Short Background on Brunswick Springs

This is from the VT Historical Society in an article dealing with the railroads along the CT River:

**The Brunswick Mineral Springs lie along the Connecticut River, about two miles south of the railroad junction at North Stratford, NH.  Brunswick Springs consists of six separate mineral springs that boil out of a steep bank sixty-five feet above the river.  The six springs contain, in order, arsenic, bromide, sulfur, magnesium, calcium, and iron.  According to The History of Brunswick, Vermont, the story is told that Indians from Lake Magog brought a British soldier to the springs in 1784 to heal a wounded arm. (26)  Not long after, the first  Brunswick citizen began to take boarders into his home for mineral water treatments, and a tourism industry was established. 

The heyday of Brunswick Springs coincided with the Gilded Age.  In his essay, Arcadia in New England: Divergent Visions of a Changing Vermont, 1850-1920, Kevin Graffagnino recounts how communities such as Brunswick Springs advertised their waters as a cure for “rheumatism, diabetes, syphilis, cancer, and virtually any other human ailment.” (46)  This was a specious claim, but effective.  To the city folk of the Gilded Age, locations such as Brunswick Springs offered not only a rural retreat from the summer heat, but a cure to all their ills as well.

The Brunswick Springs House was built above the springs drawing patients far and near.  The development that allowed this was the railroad.  Patients seeking the healing waters of the springs were able to travel by rail to North Stratford where they were then taken by stage to the Brunswick Springs House.  Visitors would spend the summer before retuning to the city refreshed and healed.  The success was temporary however.  A fire burned down the original Brunswick Springs House.   Two subsequent attempts to rebuild also met a fiery fate, leading to the legend that the grounds were cursed by the original Native American inhabitants to punish anyone looking to profit from the springs' healing waters.**