The idea for this book did not start with the Fountain of Youth but rather a house. And perhaps not the house you’d expect. The first real image I had for the book was a brown house, its front yard littered with garden ornaments and old cars in various states of disrepair. In Maine, where I live, such houses are common. These homes always intrigue me. I wonder if the people had planned to fix the cars at one point in time, or if they were saving them for some reason. The inside of the house was just as clear to me: every available surface covered in books. I had a friend growing up whose house had books stacked in every room. There were bookcases in the kitchen and bathroom, all full to bursting. This was a family of readers: people who loved books. Just like Mallory’s family. Once I had the house, a town sprung up around it. I had this idea of a stranger coming into town and meeting Mallory. And in that town, strange things were happening. People were smarter and stronger and they seemed to live longer.
I was living in Poland, Maine, while I wrote most of The Water Castle, just a few miles down the road from the Poland Springs headquarters. On their grounds was Preservation Park and a hotel. Soon after moving to Poland, my husband and I went for a hike on the overrun trails. We followed the signs to “the Source” and found a small building. We couldn’t go in, but the glass sides afforded us a view of a tiled room with a well in the middle. Two mannequins sat in wicker chairs while a third mannequin served them water in crystal glasses.
Later, we were able to go into the bottling house. I was surprised at how different it was from my idea of today’s manufacturing plants. Just as it was described in this book, the floor and walls were made of marble. Black-and-white photos showed white-clad workers filling bottles of water. We also visited the Maine State Building, which shared the history of Poland Springs. In the eighteen hundreds, Hiram Ricker, who had suffered from digestion problems for many years, went out to the fields to supervise his laborers. After drinking the water from the spring on the property, he was cured. Though the family had long drunk from the spring when ill, Hiram’s recovery marked the first time the family believed the water was truly medicinal. The Ricker family, which owned the land, opened an inn near the bottling plant that would eventually grow into a grand hotel, the Poland Spring House. They began selling the water in 1859. At the same time, they marketed the resort as a place to come and enjoy the countryside—and drink the restorative water.
The resort and water business were at their peak just as science came into its own in this country. You can see this in the advertisements. A full-page ad in the New-York Daily Tribune in 1893 proclaims the “marvelous cures” of the water from Poland Spring, and boasts of the “rare and mysterious properties in the water, which are beyond the power of man or science to explain.” Yet to bolster the claims, the ad goes on to quote doctors who confirm the medicinal properties of the water. The purveyors claimed it had been proven to aid with everything from diabetes to malarial fever to scrofula (a form of tuberculosis) and gravel (an old name for kidney stones). This tension between the wonder of miracles and the scientific claims of doctors interested me and became the heart of my story.
It might seem strange now that people once believed in the power of the water. It would be easy to mock them as naive or gullible, just as Will chided those who believed in the cure-alls of the time. However, it is in our nature to want quick and easy fixes. As a culture we celebrate youth and fear mortality—that is why the legend of the Fountain of Youth is so strong. Makeup promises to keep our faces looking youthful, while every day it seems a new food is heralded as a way to fend off aging. And so the fountain—water that can give life—wound its way into the story. A question that interests me—one that Mallory struggles with at the end of the book—is if such an elixir truly exists, would we want to drink it? Would you?
But what about the Water Castle itself? I have visited many preserved buildings and historic homes that have been restored to a certain time period and opened as museums. These places always fascinate me for their glimpses into the past. Several years ago, though, I was able to see a magnificent old home that was still in use by the heirs of the original family. How strange it was to eat off dishes older than my grandparents and to sleep in an oversize bed and think of how many other guests had slept there. The final piece fell into place: a building from the past put into modern use. This Water Castle is based on this house: a large stone building with rooms upon rooms, beguiling architecture, and mysteries at every turn. I am so grateful to my distant cousin who let me work in the house. I sat at the desk I imagined to be Orlando’s and typed out the words that you read. As far as I know, the house has never glowed blue, there are no tunnels or laboratory underneath, and, certainly, there is no barrel of life-extending water on the roof.