Early Years
1771 - First Mineral Spring in America
Surveyors noted a bubbling spring near the Kaydeross Creek. At the time, they did not realize that they had just "officially" discovered the first mineral spring in America, to become known as the Public Well, then Iron Railing Spring - the Old Iron Spring. Over the next decade travelers began to visit the spring, but no permanent settlements were raised around or near it. The original spring was about fifty feet south of the present pavilion, in what would now be the middle of Front Street.
1783 - The First Settler
There is no record of the first "white man" who came to settle within the present limits of the village. But among the first was Jonathan Peckham, who purchased a tract of land in 1783, made a "clearing," and built his log cabin home the same year. This stood on what is today Pleasant Street. Before him, although the Spring was visited regularly since its discovery in 1771, no permanent settlement was built.
1787 & 1792 - First Tavern & Hotel
Benajah Douglas, father of 1860 presidential candidate Stephen A. Douglas, built the first tavern in Ballston Spa, followed by a hotel in 1792. The hotel was located on his land near the Iron Spring.
1792 - Low's First Hotel (The McMaster House)
Nicholas Low built a comparable hotel to Douglas's. This was fifteen years before he would build the Sans Souci (1803). Douglas and Low’s hotels were roughly thirty by forty feet in size - impressive enough for the period. In 1795 this house passed into the hands of the McMaster brothers, who extended it.
1795 - The Aldridge House
Joshua Aldridge purchased Douglas's hotel (the First hotel), enlarged it, and named it “Aldridge House,” charging $8 per week for guests who came to enjoy the Spring's mineral waters. Today the building is known as the Brookside Museum.
1792 thru 1795 - Tourism Arrives
More public houses were built between 1792 and 1795, and in 1794, six years before Gideon Putnam began to build the Union at Saratoga, the great tide of summer travel set in towards Ballston Spa. The once quiet, secluded, yet beautiful glen around the old iron-railing spring, rapidly cleared of its forests, became the resort of fashion and wealth; and with the rush of visitors for the summer came all the other institutions of a thriving village - stores, shops, schools, and churches.
The Next 10 Years
These ten or so years of superior accommodations afforded by Ballston Spa before the building of the Union at Saratoga would doubtless have cost Saratoga its now peerless position among watering-places, had not the Ballston springs been afterwards, through natural or artificial causes, nearly lost. But in the early years of the nineteenth century, and prior to the incorporation of the village, the mineral springs of Ballston Spa had attained great renown, and with its unrivaled hotel accommodations, the village became the "first watering place of America."
Early Names
Prior to the incorporation of the village in 1807 under the name of Ballston Spa, the post-office had been named "Ballston Springs," and writers of an early period spoke of the settlement as "Ball's Town," or as "Ballston." In some early deeds the place is called "Ballston Salt Springs," and also "Town of Spa," and Gordon Creek is mentioned as "Spa Creek."
1803 - The Sans Souci
The same year as the Union Hotel at Saratoga was built, Nicholas Low built the Sans Souci. The hotel was 156 feet long with a wing extending back from each end at 150 feet, all of them three stories high and contained lodging for 250 people. This was an enormous structure during its day, rivaled only by Putnam’s Union Hotel. No expense was spared to make it, and for years after it was the largest and most charming resort in th States.
1804 - The Village Hotel (Now Medbery's Hotel)
The Village Hotel (now Medbery's Hotel) at the corner of Front and Spring streets, was built in 1804, ad first had a frontage of only twenty-five feet on Front street. In 1824 William Clark purchased the property, and added another twenty-five feet, and his son Nathaniel added still another twenty-five feet, finalizing the hotel to its present size. Nathaniel sold to Stephen Medbery in 1847 - the hotel still stands today.