| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Poland Spring: A Tale of the Gilded Age, 1860–1900. By David L. Richards. Durham and Hanover, N.H.: University of New Hampshire Press and University Press of New England, 2005. x + 313 pp. Illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $45.00.

Maine's Poland Spring resort is perhaps best known to readers as the original source for the bottled water that still bears its name. But as David Richards's compelling book demonstrates, the resort was also a paragon of Gilded Age American culture—a place where the class-based values, anxieties, and aspirations held by many during the last decades of the nineteenth century found expression in a specific tourist economy. Poland Spring offers a detailed account of the resort and its owners, the Rickers, who transformed the family homestead into a five-thousand-acre complex with grand hotels, pleasure grounds, a working farm, and a spring house where guests could drink the resort's renowned water. Richards draws on insights from business, social, and environmental histories to tell his story. But his primary goal is to craft a cultural history of the Gilded Age by linking the story of Poland Spring to larger cultural tensions between modernity and antimodernity prevalent in American society at the time. Poland Spring, Richards argues, was simultaneously an escape from the worst of late-nineteenth-century urban life as well as a modern "summer city" unto itself. It was a place where nostalgic, antimodern sentiment blended with sophisticated urbanity and a faith in material achievement.

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