On July 24, 1884, about 1,000 people came to the northwest corner of Utah Lake for the opening of Beck's Saratoga Springs. The warm sulphur springs there had drawn bathers for decades. In 1860 John Conrad Naile, a veteran of the Mormon Battalion, had bought the land and springs for $3,000 in gold he had panned in California, and he planted apples and raised flax beside them. In 1884 he leased the place to John Beck, then Lehi's wealthiest resident, who bought the springs and more than 1,000 surrounding acres and named the resort after the famous spa in New York.
Beck offered two plunge baths, six hot tub baths at 25 cents, rowboats, sailboats, a baseball ground, shooting galleries and a race track. He also posted rules against drunkenness, profanity, improper dress, soap in the plunges and splashing near ladies, and he meant them: "If you cannot obey our rules, we do not want your money!" Professor A. Siebert of Germany bottled the water as Saratoga Salvation for local drugstores. By 1893 wagons ran from Lehi to the springs for 50 cents round trip. A dance floor came in 1894, and in 1895 a large new plunge and bathhouses on the lower springs opened directly onto the lake for swimming and boating.
A shoreline of resorts
Saratoga was the first of many. Over the years more than 20 resorts operated around Utah Lake, and from the 1880s to the 1930s as many as twelve at a time offered boat rentals, picnic grounds, dance halls, pools and bathhouses. The three biggest were Saratoga, Geneva and the Provo Lake Resort. Vineyard's neighbor was John Dallin's Geneva Resort, just up the east shore, which has its own story on this site.
In June 1889, Neils Omanson opened the Garden City Resort near the mouth of the Provo River, with bathhouses and rented swimsuits, a large dance pavilion where Provo's Silver and Opera House bands played and a half mile horse racing track. Visitors from the north end of the county could come by water on the steamer Eastmond, 40 feet long and 12 feet wide, which carried as many as 125 passengers at about 7 miles an hour.
When Garden City closed, the Provo Lake Resort took its place west of what is now the Provo airport, advertising itself as owned and managed by Provo people and reached by the Provo City Railroad. It had a pavilion, a restaurant and bar, a boathouse and a busy pier. In August 1908 veterans of Utah's Indian wars camped on its beach for several days. The lake that made the resort finally ended it. After nearly 30 years, it closed in 1918, flooded for the last time by rising water.
The south end of the lake had its own resort. Around 1889 John Hallet built a stone house and an outdoor dance floor at Lincoln Point, then sold the property to Hyrum Argyle, who added a pool fed by hot springs, a bathhouse, a store and saloon, a guest house and a pier with rental boats. Andrew Jenson's church chronology dates the opening of Lincoln Beach to August 6, 1892. That July the Spanish Fork Sun reported eight bathhouses and twenty five bathing suits on hand, and said the steamer Helen of Provo would carry bathers to the beach for 25 cents round trip. The roads were rough and remote, though, and Argyle eventually moved his buildings to his home in Lake Shore. In 1915 Henry Fernsten rebuilt the site with a cement pool and picnic grounds and prospered for about 15 years, until he vanished on a business trip to Colorado.
Boats between the beaches
Boats tied the shoreline together. William M. "Billy" Wilson, a Provo businessman and former member of the Provo rowing team, managed the Geneva Resort for the Provo Sportsman's Club early in the twentieth century and built an excursion boat, the Reanon W., that left Geneva each weekend to visit the other resorts. In 1914 it hosted a convention of the state's druggists. At Saratoga, the Lehi Sun announced in June 1921 that a 20 passenger launch named the Utah Bell had been added for amusement and passenger service.
If you cannot obey our rules, we do not want your money!John Beck's posted warning at Saratoga Springs
The Jazz Age brought one more resort to the mouth of the Provo River. Arthur N. Taylor opened the Provona Beach Resort in July 1921, building a bridge over the river to reach the site where Utah Lake State Park stands today. Early in 1922 a winter storm shoved ice onto the shore and destroyed the bathhouses, and the spring runoff flooded what was left. Taylor rebuilt in 1925 with electric lights, a store selling ice cream and soft drinks and a movable pier that could follow the shifting waterline. Around 1926 freelance pilots began landing on the sand and selling airplane rides for 25 cents.
Provona's biggest day was July 4, 1930. Two mock battleships, built for the occasion, refought the Battle of Manila Bay with specially made shells and fireworks. The show was advertised as far north as Ogden, and more than 4,000 cars of spectators arrived for a day of bathing beauties, vaudeville, swimming races and diving contests before the battle itself. The crowd went home sometime after midnight.
The showboat years
The lake was about to shrink beneath them. Informal speedboat races held at Geneva in 1927 and 1928 ended when drought drove the water to record lows in the early 1930s. Two Provo men, Hewitt Strong and Elmer Smith, answered the hard times by building the largest vessel ever to sail the lake, a flat bottomed showboat 90 feet long and 22 feet wide with a dance floor, a stage for live music and a galley. They named it the S.S. Sho-Boat.
The Utah State Dentists' Association chartered its first cruise on April 11, 1932, and the first public cruise left on April 25. Adults paid 50 cents for the round trip and children from 7 to 15 paid a quarter. Every Sunday afternoon the boat sailed to Bird Island, also called Rock Island, about 6 miles from the mouth of the Provo River. At 8 miles an hour the trip and a short visit could take four hours. Gulls defended their nests from egg hunting passengers, who were advised to carry umbrellas and wear broad brimmed hats. Rex Blake of Vineyard remembered the voyage decades later: "I remember taking a girl there when I was 17, out to the island."
Through the Depression and the war the Sho-Boat hosted parties, meetings, dinners, dances and at least one wedding. It sailed until 1947 and was then beached on the south side of the Provo River, near the present state park. Work on the Provo Boat Harbor had begun in the 1930s to replace the defunct Provona, and after the war it was finished. In 1938 locals began the Memorial Day boat races, which drew thousands of spectators for more than four decades, and in 1967 the state took over the harbor as Utah Lake State Park.
Last resort standing
The resorts themselves faded. Fear of polio from sewage in the lake kept many swimmers away in the 1940s and early 1950s, and by the 1960s and 1970s signs warned people not to swim and most resorts had closed. Saratoga outlasted them all. Frank H. Eastmond, who had run Geneva, took over its management in 1930 and advertised swimming in drinking water. It survived a 1968 fire that destroyed its main building, reopening in time for Memorial Day, and added a two story waterslide called the Kamikaze. In 1997 the old resort became part of the new city of Saratoga Springs, which grew up on Beck's land.
From vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-pleasure-resorts/
