That was the year Colonel Richard Dunbar, a railroad contractor from New York, announced to the world that he had been cured of diabetes by drinking 12 glasses of water in a single day from a Waukesha spring.

Shortly after, he bought the land around the spring, which he dubbed Bethesda, and began selling water to people outside the area. Soon, other springs were being named, bottled and marketed with tales of miraculous waters that could cure liver diseases, kidney diseases, rheumatism, yellow fever, depression, constipation and countless other ailments.

Over the next four decades, Waukesha was known as Spring City, and the Saratoga of the West. The water attracted both the wealthy and the famous, including Sears & Roebuck founder Richard Sears and Abraham Lincoln’s widow, Mary Todd Lincoln.

By the early 20th Century, though, the fad had faded, and the flow of tourists stopped. But Waukesha was growing very quickly, and the springs could no longer meet the rapidly expanding city’s needs. Waukesha needed a new source of water. One was quickly found: Deep wells, some extending more than 2,000 feet down, that reached an extensive sandstone aquifer.

The subject of water resource management is often emotionally charged, and the passions it raises can lead to a blurring of the line between myth and fact. We’d like to address some of the common misperceptions that have arisen since Lake Michigan was identified as the only reasonable long term water supply for Waukesha.