19-05-2025
Mineral water made Colfax a booming vacation hot spot
COLFAX, Iowa — Busy streets, booked hotels and booming business.
'There were people with taxis with horse drawn buggies and they'd be hollering out 'Mason House Hotel. Come here,' Kevin Williams who serves as President of the Colfax Historical Society reflects on the town during the late 1800s.
Today, this Jasper County town of 2,000 may not be a tourism hub but Williams, who grew up in Colfax, works tirelessly to make sure locals and visitors remember that for a 40-year stretch Colfax was experiencing a Silicon Valley like surge.
'This must have been quite a place,' said Williams.
It wasn't microchips and technology it was water. Williams said, 'At one time there were three different railroads that came through Colfax and they shipped water all across the country.'
Colfax was originally a coal mining town. In 1875, workers trying to build tracks west towards Des Moines were digging underground when they hit water.
'At about 300 feet, drilling their test hole they hit water and it was artesian water. It was under pressure and so that water went all the way to the top and out the top of the pipe.'
Americans couldn't get enough of the natural mineral spring water found beneath Colfax soil.
'Right in those late 1870 and 1880s the medical community really thought a lot of mineral water. They thought mineral water was the best thing you can do if you bathed in it, if you drank it, any way you could get it into your body, was good for you. Colfax capitalized on that,' said Williams.
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Hotels couldn't be built fast enough to keep up with demand and the tourism. Williams said, 'By the time we reached early 1900 there were 19 mineral wells, nine hotels, five bottling works. The mineral water industry for a period was a big booming time for Colfax.'
Businesses thrived just by bottling the water and shipping it out. Williams showed off clear glass bottles inside the museum in Colfax saying, 'They all would have carried paper labels that would describe the healing effects of the mineral water.'
Few remnants of this golden era remain, but many are still on display inside the Colfax Historical Society. Williams said, 'At the heyday there were about 30,000 people that visited Colfax a year.'
Perhaps the most majestic reminder remains at the top of a hill. Inhabited by Sheepgate, a teen and adult recovery center, the former Colfax Hotel was so large it demanded its own train depot, power plant and trolley.
'Three hundred rooms when it was built it was a large hotel on one hundred acres and it had a six hole golf course,' said Williams.
For four decades Colfax rode a wave of mythical proportions, but due to breakthroughs in modern medicine and World War I the boom went bust. Williams said, 'What really ceases the water industry in Colfax was World War I because during World War I the hotels couldn't get supplies.'
Much like the surprise coal miners found over 100 years ago the charm and history of Colfax goes deeper than what you may find at the surface. Williams said, 'For us to be able to tell the story is the most important part of our existence here.'
For more information on Colfax history you can visit the Colfax Historical Society or donate to preserve the town's history at their website.
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