It’s easy to take the town in which you grew up for granted. Whether your home is the Big Apple, near the pristine beaches of the Florida Keys, or a small rural town like the one that I grew up in, others will visit your old stomping ground amazed by all that is has to offer, while you are left wondering what in the world it is that they are seeing that you don’t.
In my case, that town was Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania, a conservative podunk town of barely over two-thousand that is situated one half of an hour south of that state’s third largest city, Erie. Most everyone that grows up in the time knows hears of the history: back a hundred or so years ago, there were mineral springs that people thought could heal whatever ailed them, a lot of people visited, there were a bunch of huge hotels, people realized the mineral springs didn’t heal them, the biggest and most prominent hotel burnt down, and with it, the once prosperous and popular tourist town dried up, right along with the springs.
That’s the short story that the townies know and are constantly reminded every time that they pass one of the only remaining remnants of that bygone era, The Riverside Inn, a charming place that locals rarely visit but attracts thousands of visitors each summer and gives sixteen year olds a place to work within walking distance. It’s no surprise that I worked there myself, both in high school running the buffet line in the dining room, and then again as a waiter when I moved back to the area at age twenty to help pay my way through college.
Locals – and even I’m a bit guilty of this – don’t seem to really recognize how amazing it is to have a place like The Riverside Inn in their town, a living, breathing reminder that reflects back to a time when there were over forty hotels in the town, when the sitting President of the United States visited to dedicate the town’s college, when a woman who’d become a leading teacher of the Bahá’í faith grew up on a local farm and went to the school, when the World Chess Tournament took place in the town. There’s even a widely known chess strategy aptly named the Cambridge Springs Defense. To most who grew up there, the inn is just a big old building that has always been there, a place to take photographs at before prom or where a family friend might have their wedding reception.
There was a time before the previous owners Mike and Marie Halliday bought it in the mid-80s when the inn was in shambles, almost to the point of being condemned, and the only purpose it served at the time was a dormitory for the local college (a college that has since become a female penitentiary). Besides the significant boost to the local economy, the inn has so much more value. If you can get past some of the tacky 1970s furniture scattered throughout, you can treat yourself to what is essentially a museum unlike any other in the area. Original photographs, maps, clothing, and artifacts are all over the inn, and you’ll see photos reminding you of a time when the inn held a two-floor casino (now converted into a ballroom and dinner theater), a bowling alley, creek access for boats and canoes, and a long boardwalk that lead directly to a spring house.
A few months back, before the winter hit, I visited the remains of the spring house, which burnt down sometime in the 1970s. The boardwalk leading from the inn to the spring house was washed away decades ago, so to access it, one must pull over near the intersection of route 19 and Miller Station Road, then make the way through the overgrown grass – which I managed just fine. I explored the ruins, where the marks of the burning still remain, broken beer bottles and graffiti are abundant, and weeds threaten to completely consume the once prominent spring house. Immediately below is an old photo of the quarter-mile boardwalk that once lead to the spring house, and the rest are a few of the photos that I snapped while exploring the ruins:
If I one day become financially successful in the literary world (or another venture), I’d hope to someday provide the funds to have the boardwalk and spring house rebuilt, perhaps having it turned into a classy Victorian-style bar, where couples staying at the hotel or people from around the area looking for something nice to do can walk across the dimly-lit boardwalk on a warm summer night and order glasses of wine to take out and enjoy under the night sky. Sure, it may not be a big money maker and my vision is a little classier than the town might suggest, but it’d be a great complement to the inn and I think it’d be a go-to place for romantic lovers in the surrounding area. But I digress.
Even though the healing power of the springs was eventually discovered to be completely false – and regardless, the springs would soon dry up anyway – I often wonder what Cambridge Springs would have been like had the Rider Hotel never burnt down in the 1930s. Built by William D. Rider, perhaps out of prideful spite after losing out on his portion of the Riverside Inn, his goal was to create the greatest hotel between Chicago and New York City, especially since the town was literally the halfway point between the two cities by rail. By most accounts, he succeeded and the hotel was absurdly popular with travelers and tourists, large in part due to Rider’s uncanny ability to publicize and promote. The hotel dwarfed the Riverside Inn, standing seven stories, covering five acres, and among much more, had a theater for five-hundred, a bowling alley, an indoor swimming pool, two gyms, a gigantic sunroom, a roof garden (where it was said on a clear day, you could see Lake Erie), and its own 9-hole golf course.
Were it still standing today, I’m convinced that the drawing power of the hotel would be remarkable and the town I grew up would not exist as it is today. What a strange history the town holds though. There was the self-described “hobo writer,” Leon Ray Livingston, arguably the most famous hobo in American history (note: “hobo” by definition is not simply a homeless person, but a “migrant worker” who travels from place to place, commonly by freight train, working whatever job he or she can find), known by historians as King of the Hobos for his writing of various books on the hobo lifestyle and perfecting the “hobo symbols system.” He spent his life traveling the U.S. for thirty years due to an irrepressible urge despite his wealth, sometimes palling around with writer Jack London, and he’d write about his journeys and life in an attempt to convince young people (including London) not to follow the same path that he had – but his plan backfired, romanticizing the hobo lifestyle and making him a folk hero, of sorts.
Much of his time was spent in Cambridge Springs, which he called his “headquarters.” I’ve been asked about him a dozen or so times while working at the Riverside, because legend has it that he is buried in Cambridge Springs. A little research and it seems that he might actually buried in Millcreek Township, right outside of Erie. Strangely though, in 1894, he did purchase a tombstone in a Cambridge Springs cemetery with money he won, although I’m not clear on why he did this or where exactly this is located. He did once say of the tombstone purchase (of which he himself etched “A-No.1 at Rest at Last”): “Do you know the call to wander is so irresistible that often on a dark and rainy night I find myself walking about a railroad yard looking for a chance to move on? You would not believe me, yet it is a fact that I realize that my end will be the same as that of 90 percent of all tramps – an accident. This is why I have at least provided for a decent burial.”. As to why I bring him up, besides the fact that he was just a fascinating individual, Livingston described Cambridge Springs in the first chapter of one of his books and it gives one a sense of what the town was like then and even a bit today:
Set like a royal jewel amid the foothills of the Alleghenies where the latter cross Northwestern Pennsylvania towards the waters of Lake Erie, is idyllic Cambridge Springs. Not only have its grand scenic environs given to this town of lesser dimensions a land wide reputation as a most charming summer resort, but the medicinal properties of its numberless gushing springs have so added to its fame, until annually thousands of people in need of health and recreation make a pilgrimage to this “Carlsbad of America,” filling to capacity the spacious hotels bordering its maple-shaded avenues. Because of its convenient railroad location, I had made my headquarters for many years at delightful Cambridge Springs. Driven by the weird promptings of the Wanderlust hither and thither about the globe, time and again when the almost incredible hazards of the Wander Path had brought me dangerously close to the verge of a mental and physical collapse, I hastened back to Cambridge Springs, there to find a brief respite from the hardships of the Road. That I had chosen Cambridge Springs as my headquarters, quickly became common knowledge to the Brethren of the Road, with the result that the otherwise rather aristocratic health resort soon became a veritable “Mecca” to chronic hoboes. From every train chancing to stop at Cambridge Springs, Sons of Unrest dropped singly, in pairs, and at times even in squadrons, and when told that I was in town, hurried to Mrs. Cunningham’s boarding house where I always lodged when “at home,” there either to renew old friendships, make my acquaintance or a financial touch, which latter reason was the most frequent object of their visits, and which assistance was refused to none, until impudent and intoxicated scoundrels put a limit to my benevolence. … As it is the bane of every small burg, so in Cambridge Springs, everybody knows every other body’s business, and as I had been duly advised of Mrs. Cunningham’s personal history, I made it a point to give my patronage exclusively to her boarding house. But a man’s reputation hangs to his heels like a shadow, and soon some local busybody had acquainted Mrs. Cunningham with her new boarder’s antecedents, with the result that she came to interrogate me concerning the existence her son had led prior to his death, and which to her, as to so many others who see but never investigate the doings of the hoboes, was a sealed book.
Cambridge Springs was a fine place to grow up as it was though – with so little going on, it forced me to use my imagination, and boy, did I ever. Parents send kids out to play all day without any worry… although maybe they should have been worried about me, with the combination of little to do in town and my daredevil antics mixed with very little fear of pain or death, I’m still trying to figure out how I survived my childhood or came out relatively unscathed. It’s the kind of town though where families leave for the day and don’t bother locking their doors, where “My child is an honor role student at Cambridge Springs Elementary” bumper stickers decorate vans, and you can’t go to the grocery store without knowing every single person you see there. Today, it’s a small town like every other small town in America, but a town with a rather remarkable history and plenty of prominent people peppered throughout.
Mel Townley comes to mind. After moving back from Florida and going back to the Riverside to make some money, I came to know Mel Townley as well as anyone in the town could. Every town has one: the eccentric, strange old man who spends his days walking around town and nobody really knows much about him. Mel came in for breakfast on a daily basis, tipped a dollar every time, and frankly, I would groan every time he came in, because it would be early in the morning and boy, did he love to ramble on. There was a joke amongst the serving staff about Mel’s friend he brought with him, since he would sit in the corner table and often carry on a conversation with himself. I had many conversations with the man though, as he took a particular liking to me and a few of the other waiters, perhaps because I was one of the few that would patiently listen to his stories and nod my head.
He spent every winter away from the horrid winters of Cambridge Springs – often Hawaii, because he enjoyed the beaches and the weather and he would usually stay on the beaches in a tent, riding his bicycle around the island, and, as I imagined, talking the ears off of many of the locals. I knew that Mel was wealthy, but I never knew how wealthy or where he came into such money. He didn’t own a home and often spent the summer’s staying either in the little trolley station downtown that he owned and painted in or at the bed and breakfast that my friend’s parents owned. He spent most of his days reading, riding around on his bicycle, and painting. He invited me into the trolley station once, which was scattered with dozens of his paintings, and he had talent and I noted how well kept the inside of the station was, which was surprising, as it was built in 1903 and hadn’t been used for much of anything in decades.
In our conversations, he talked of his travels all over the world, which did pique my interest, and I knew that he spoke several languages, he had been in the military at some point, had never been married (he was, in fact, homosexual), but I was never able to get out of him what it was that he had actually done career-wise and he’d often switch the subject over to me, ask me questions, and prod at me to make sure I knew that there was nothing more important in life than seeing the world, which I wasn’t in disagreement over. The final time that I saw Mel was shortly before the Riverside closed up for the winter. He had told me that he’d be going to Panama for the winter, as Hawaii had become boring. When the inn opened up again in the spring, Mel did not show up. I no longer saw him riding his bicycle around town. Nobody seemed to have any idea and it wasn’t until months later when his obituary was in the paper that we learned he had been put a home for his final months and he died without much of anyone around – and this is when I found out about the amazing life that Mel lead:
An Erie native, Townley graduated from Penn State University in 1952, receiving a bachelor of arts degree in liberal arts. After serving in the U.S. Army for two years during the Korean War, stationed in the Rhine/Pfaltz area of Germany, he remained in western Europe to study for several years. He never married.
After serving as curator at the Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington for 23 years, he retired, spending several winters in the Hawaiian Islands and summers in Cambridge Springs. “He came back about 10 years ago — maybe nine,” Higham recalled, noting that Townley used the trolley depot as a studio, leaving countless paintings behind. “He had eclectic interests — and he was a real slow talker,” Higham recalled. “He was obviously very, very bright.”
I was floored. The man who I simply thought had lost his marbles had lived quite the remarkable life. Had I known this about him, I would have prodded him to talk for hours, but instead, I thought of him as little more than an annoyance and a poor tipper, a sentiment which made me feel guilty enough as it was. He may have been one of the strangest men that I ever met, but there was a brilliant mind there that I wished I had made an effort to explore a little more. As for his assets, with no children or close family, he left all of his money and the trolley station to the Crawford County Historical Society. Pretty cool.
Good ol’ Cambridge Springs.
The world-famous town that once had so much is now little more than a blip on the radar. Blink and you’ll drive right through it, never knowing the rich history or the stories surrounding it. The days when there were so many hotels and tourists, a movie theater and opera house, and an amusement park with a working rollercoaster are long gone. Cambridge Springers now drink at the handful of dive bars, go to one of the seven churches, join the bowling league or volunteer fire department, talk about high school sports, and look forward to the annual town festival located at the park next to the creek for some cheap, thrill-less rides and bingo . Local businesses continue to struggle (and some, like the longstanding Crossbow, even go under). The sense of history is always lingering and most residents recognize it, but the indifference remains. Live in the town today, and there is a general aura of discontent with the way things are, but still comfort and routine – wake up, go to work, do what you have to do to get by, sleep. Most live rather unremarkable lives – but I think most are just fine with that.
Just remember, history surrounds us and oftentimes, it can surprise us. Take a look at where you grew up or where you live now. Really take a look. Maybe you’ll finally see that something about your town that always left those outsiders so fascinated.
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The entire world has witnessed the tragedy that has befallen Haiti. There are early estimates that the death toll may exceed 100,000 – and even if that isn’t the case, the devastation is still catastrophic. Despite the violence and looting that is taking place in the country, it is warming to see the international community and organizations coming together to do their best to provide aid and relief. In much of the country, fresh food is a near impossibility to get a hold of, as is fresh water. People are actually breaking open water lines so they can fill buckets with fresh water to keep them alive and hydrated. Even as people around the word donate money and bottled water and canned foods, the demand is just far too great. 
It’s surreal. This waterfall is 360 feet high and falls directly into a massive gorge. Comparatively, Niagara Falls is only 167 feet at its highest point. Mindblowing. Looking at the water, it must take one hell of a leap of faith to jump in there and let the current take you all of the way to the edge. If the photo doesn’t do it for you, check out these videos below. Consider this is a new personal goal.
or hanging around Presque Isle on my hoverboard during the summers. Which is unfortunate.
