Mountain Valley Spring Water is an iconic Arkansas-based brand. The company began in the 1870s, and those green bottles can still be found across the country.
"In 1871, pharmacist Peter E. Greene and his brother John Greene, originally from Arkadelphia, were the first to sell Mountain Valley Spring Water, which was then known in the Hot Springs area as Lockett's Spring Water because of its association with Benjamin Lockett and his son Enoch," Anne Speed writes for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. "The Locketts owned the spring and were the first to recognize its unusual qualities, particularly its purity and beneficial mineral content. The Greenes purchased the land from the Locketts, improving the spring site and constructing a two-story hotel, initially called the Mountain Valley Resort Hotel and later the Mountain Valley Hotel & Sanitarium. The brothers renamed the water Mountain Valley after a small community nearby.
"John Greene oversaw the spring and managed the hotel, while Peter moved to downtown Hot Springs to establish the first distributorship at 195 Central Ave. Mountain Valley Water originates at a protected spring on what was then the grounds of the hotel, just west of Arkansas Highway 7 North, about 12 miles from downtown Hot Springs. In the summer of 1879, W.N. Benton, an insurance agent formerly of St. Louis, purchased the business and properties from the Greene brothers, planning to expand the hotel and the distribution of the water."
Under Benton's leadership, water was shipped to states as far away as Maine. In 1883, the Mountain Valley Water Co. was formed with Samuel Fordyce, G.G. Latta, Zeb Ward and Samuel Stitt as investors. Ward bought out his partners in 1892 and established a distribution center in Philadelphia in 1894. August Schlafly of St. Louis bought the company in 1902 and established offices across the country. By the 1920s, Mountain Valley Spring Water was being served in the U.S. Senate. Calvin Coolidge was the first American president to serve the water at the White House. Following a heart attack in the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower drank the water on the advice of a physician.
"Other notable connoisseurs of the water included Elvis Presley and boxing champions Joe Louis, Gene Tunney and Sugar Ray Robinson," Speed writes. "Consumption of the water hasn't been limited to humans. Thoroughbreds such as Secretariat, Nashua, Kelso, Bold Ruler and Sunday Silence were trained on the water."
In 1924, Schlafly purchased the DeSoto Springs Mineral Water Co., which was headquartered in a building that had been constructed in 1910 at 150 Central Ave. A third level had been added in 1921 to house a Japanese-themed dance hall. Hot Springs was one of the nation's top resorts at the time.
The Schlafly family sold the company in 1966, and the building was closed. That building brings us to Hot Springs architects Anthony Taylor and Bob Kempkes, who recently were awarded Preserve Arkansas' Parker Westbrook Award for Lifetime Achievement during a banquet I emceed. I consider them to be the two people most responsible for the current revitalization of downtown Hot Springs.
Taylor and Kempkes became friends in the 1970s while attending architecture school at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Taylor was born at Magnolia and spent his formative years in Little Rock, graduating from Hall High School. Kempkes was born in South Dakota and grew up in the Chicago suburbs. They stayed in touch as Taylor worked in Little Rock and Kempkes worked in Denver.
In the 1980s, they decided that they wanted to move to a smaller town with their respective families in order to raise their children. They chose Hot Springs and rented an office in the former Goddard Hotel in the fall of 1986. Downtown Hot Springs was a sad place in those days. Almost 70 percent of the storefronts along Central Avenue were empty. Some of those that were occupied housed strip joints.
Kempkes and Taylor urged Brooks Rice, the chief executive officer at Mountain Valley, to restore the old building on Central Avenue. Rice decided to take a chance on the two young architects. The building was rehabilitated to house a visitors' center, fountain and hydroponic garden on the first floor with offices on the mezzanine. The third-floor Japanese ballroom was restored and converted into executive offices. In 1989, the National Trust for Historic Preservation awarded the project its coveted National Preservation Honor Award. They hadn't set out to be preservationists, but Kempkes and Taylor now had that reputation. Courtney Crouch Jr. hired them to restore the city's former post office for his Selected Funeral & Life Insurance Co.
Hot Springs projects the duo has worked on since then include the 1920 Hamp-Williams Building, the 1917 depot and the 1924 Woodmen of the Union Building. Recent projects include the 1922 Quapaw Bathhouse, which again is operating as a spa, and the 1916 Superior Bathhouse, which is a craft brewery that uses the city's thermal water as the main ingredient in its beers.
In 2013, Kempkes and Taylor joined investment banker Robert Zunick to purchase the 1913 Thompson Building and the 1904 Dugan-Stewart Building across from Bathhouse Row. The Thompson Building has been transformed into one of the city's best hotels (The Waters) and one of its premier restaurants (The Avenue). I propose a toast of Mountain Valley Spring Water to these two architects.
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Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 02/23/2019