Martinsville High School - Artesian Yearbook (Martinsville, IN)

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assssz ' :: ■ ■ r £05=5 1 1 ■ ' aQuchy Strike The Home Lawn, Martinsville’s swankiest sanitarium, yearly houses hundreds of guests. The Kennedy family operates it and the Martinsville Mineral Springs. Artesian Wells Give City Fame and a Name In 1855 a small company of five men was organized in Martinsville to drill for natural gas. Although the drilling proved a failure as far as gas was concerned, it brought about the discovery of the mineral water which event¬ ually made our town famous the world over as a health resort. The first sanitarium was built in 1889 by Captain Barnard, who set up a bathing depart¬ ment for the treatment of rheumatism. Seeing his success, others followed suit until there were seven bath establishments in Martins¬ ville: the Home Lawn, originally the Henderson Parks Sanitarium; the National; the Highland; the Martinsville Sanitarium, established in 1897 by the merger of the Martinsville Mineral Springs and the Nutter-Webster Sanitarium; the Hill-Cohn in 1904, and finally the Colonial in 1906. Not only do these waters contain valuable health minerals, they were found to flow from the ground from their own pressure. Thus they are called Artesian mineral wells, from which our town has acquired two nicknames — the Artesian City and the City of Mineral Water. Fires have taken their toll of the Martins¬ ville sanitariums until today only four remain. These are the Martinsville, Home Lawn, High¬ land, and Cohn-Barnard. Each year people come from all over the world to be treated for various ailments at these sanitariums. Page Two

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THE ARTESIAN 1954 Martinsville High School j Martinsville, Indiana

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The New Highland Sani¬ tarium, depicted here as it looked in the 1920’s, is still under management of the Scherers. INSET — The Martinsville Sanitarium, now the Martins¬ ville Mineral Springs, had its humble beginning in this building. This picture, taken before 1900, shows an early drilling for mineral water, probably on land that now belongs to the Home Lawn Mineral Springs.