On May 18, 1539, Hernando de Soto landed on the shore of what is now Old Tampa Bay with more than six hundred men. He found a set of mineral springs the local people had been using for thousands of years.
He concluded he’d found the Fountain of Youth, the one Ponce de Leon had famously failed to locate. He named the springs Espiritu Santo, Springs of the Holy Spirit, and set up camp.
He was wrong, the name stuck, and people have been selling that water ever since. The springs are a few minutes from my desk. The claims made about them over five centuries show the difference between a true story and a story that sells.
What are the Espiritu Santo Springs?
Five natural mineral springs on the western shore of Old Tampa Bay, in what is now Safety Harbor. The mineral content is real and unusual. That’s the fact underneath the mythology.
People were here long before the Spanish. The Tocobaga lived at the north end of the bay and used the springs, and the shell mound builders were here before them. Whether de Soto’s party ever set foot at the springs is uncertain. The founding story of this place may itself be a story. Each of the five springs got a reputation for curing a particular ailment. Five springs coming out of the same ground, and somebody differentiated the product line.
Who sold the water first?
Colonel William Bailey bought the land in 1855 and began promoting the healing powers and bottling the product as Espiritu Santo Water. His son-in-law James Tucker took the marketing further. He built a pavilion and a swimming pool, then brought tourists in to bathe in what he called the original Fountain of Perpetual Youth.
The town embraced it. Safety Harbor became the Health Giving City, and thousands of people came every year. By the late 1930s the advertising for the Safety Harbor Sanatorium and Hotel had escalated. Visiting was bestowing on yourself the gift of health brewed by the Great Chemist. It’s a line I admire without believing a word of it.
The Sanatorium had opened in 1926 with porcelain bathtubs and a large swimming pool for taking the waters. In 1945 the springs and the sanatorium sold to Dr. Salem Baranoff, who reopened the place as a health spa, and the resort that stands there now is the direct descendant. The springs are still there, under the hotel lobby, feeding a mineral bath you can book.
Five centuries, one water source, and an unbroken line of people making money from a claim that was never true in the way they sold it.
What can a writer learn from a five-hundred-year sales pitch?
I take three things from it.
The first is that the story is the product.
The mineral water is a commodity; the Fountain of Youth is a business. What Bailey and Tucker and the sanatorium owners were selling was a narrative that made a bath meaningful, and people traveled across the country for it. Books work the same way. Two authors with identical expertise sell very differently, and the difference is whether somebody shaped the material into something a reader wants.
The second is that a claim you can’t support eventually costs more than it earns.
Nobody says Fountain of Youth now with a straight face. The resort sells a mineral bath and the history, and both are real. The overclaim faded out. The true part lasted. Any author tempted to promise transformation in a subtitle should notice how that went.
The third is about longevity. That water has been the town’s central asset since before the United States existed. Whatever you write, ask which part of it is the spring and which part is the advertising. Every generation has to replace the advertising. The spring doesn’t.
How did Safety Harbor get its name?
This place has had several names. Worth’s Harbor. Green’s Springs. Safety Harbor came from the early eighteenth century. A ship that got this far up the bay was out of reach of pirates, and the water was plainly safe.
During the spa era the town styled itself the Health Giving City. That’s a positioning statement, and it does what a subtitle does on a book cover: it tells you what the thing is for before you’ve decided whether you want it.
The pirate name survived, and I think that’s because it described something that had happened instead of something being promised. Titles behave the same way. The ones that last describe the book. The ones that age badly describe the hoped-for effect on the reader.
Is there anything real behind the Espiritu Santo Springs legend?
Yes, and it’s more interesting than the mythology. The water is high in minerals. Soaking in warm mineral water is pleasant and relieves stress, and stress relief has real effects on real bodies. None of that requires a fountain of youth, and it’s enough to have sustained a business for a hundred and seventy years. People have gathered at this spot for something like ten thousand years. Whatever the water does or doesn’t do, people coming here to feel better is older than every claim made about it, and that continuity beats the sales copy. That’s usually how it goes with an overclaimed story. Strip the exaggeration and what remains is quieter, stranger, and better. The same thing happens in a good memoir when somebody stops telling the version they tell at parties.
Ten thousand years of the same idea
The historical marker at the springs says the native population used the water for nearly ten thousand years. Ten thousand years is roughly the full span of human settled life, and for all of it people have been coming to this patch of ground because they believed the water would help.
De Soto arriving in 1539 was a late entry. Bailey bottling it in 1855 was later still. The sanatorium, the spa, the current resort: all of them are recent tenants of a much older habit.
When people tell me their family story isn’t important enough to write down, this is the example I reach for.
The famous names attached to this place are all latecomers. The durable thing is what ordinary people did here over and over for a hundred centuries, and almost none of them left a record. You can.
Can you visit the Espiritu Santo Springs?
The springs sit within the resort, so seeing them means being there as a guest or booking a treatment. The historical marker for Espiritu Santo Springs is outdoors and free, and the pier and marina next door are public.
The town around it’s the better visit anyway, and I’ve written about where to work in Safety Harbor for anyone who wants to combine the history with an afternoon of getting something done. The Baranoff Oak downtown, named for the doctor who bought the springs, is worth a visit.
For the older layer of this story, go north to Philippe Park and the Tocobaga temple mound, the part of the history that was here first and gets the least attention.
The story you are really selling
Everybody who wants a book has a version of the Fountain of Youth in their pitch. The thing they hope the book will do, stated slightly larger than it can be.
Part of my job is finding the true claim underneath it, because that’s what a reader will trust and what holds up over years. Somebody comes in wanting to write the book that transforms their industry, and what they have is forty years of hard-won specifics that will help a younger version of themselves. The second book is better, and it sells.
That’s the work I do with people as a ghostwriter in Safety Harbor, and we can do it a short walk from the springs. The rest of this cluster is in the Writing in Tampa Bay hub. If you want to know what your book is before writing it, the Discovery Intensive answers that, and it won’t promise you a fountain.
