W. Keith Brenton

If you follow Spring Street north from Crescent Spring, make the turn to the west at its northernmost bend, you’ll come to Grotto Spring.

This beautiful spring reservation is a must-stop for visitors in cars or on the tour tram. Inside its natural cave — enhanced by a stone arch — the temperature is cool and there is almost always at least one candle burning in the darkness.

Though we are behind on rainfall right now, you can still see a damp floor where spring waters sometimes drip through. After a long gully-washer, this sub-grade spring will sometimes flood out.

Don’t laugh, now! A lot of Eureka Springs’ streets are staircases! Just don’t try to drive up and down them. For that, we have Mountain, Owen and Pine Streets, among others!

Cora Pinckley Call’s long-sold souvenir book, “A Stairstep Town” is aptly titled. I drew from her work, among many others, for historical information when writing “The People of the Waters.” I still do sometimes.

I skipped Harding Spring! It resides on Spring Street between Sweet Spring and Crescent Spring, of course. A number of healings by water were reported here, including a rather famous one for blindness.

Harding Spring features the railed “lover’s leap” atop its steamboat rock, and a brand-new wooden staircase will take you to the top of it, and one of many enjoyable trails within our little city.

(Sorry that the marker is hard to read with the paper wasp nest on it.)

Crescent Spring is the next stop on our tour of Eureka’s spring reservations, set aside for public benefit early in the city’s history. This is the one for which Crescent Hotel is named, and you can still climb the stone steps up the hill to see that stately castle in the Ozarks. The current gazebo replaced the original one many decades after it had fallen into disrepair, and for many years was white with sage green trim. The current purple-and-aqua color scheme was applied in 2013 during a renovation. It features a copper roof, which has acquired a natural patina.

If you walk a couple of blocks southwest of Basin Spring, where our tour began yesterday, you’ll come to Calif Spring (various spellings throughout the years) on the grounds of the Eureka Springs Historical Museum. The spring is now sealed in a rock roundhouse, where in years past its waters were purified by ultraviolet light.

The museum gift shop kindly carries a few copies of my “People of the Waters” novels, if you’re in town and looking!

Collected from the ‘net a couple of years ago and since vanished, these last few stereoviews in my collection include a few more of the Crescent Hotel, the site of at least a couple of pivotal scenes in the “People of the Water” Cycle of novels.

This 1906 newspaper ad tells potential visitors that a pleasant horseback ride in the woods is available via the Frisco Railroad and its connecting line to Eureka Springs. Stan, one of the characters in my novel “The Water Cure,” works for that connecting line, the Missouri & North Arkansas Railroad. (St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat)

I’m not sure whether the novel’s beast-of-burden Neddie would have taken riders or not. Perhaps Jen.

Enjoy 10 more of these stereoviews of Eureka Springs taken at the turn of the 20th Century (most by photographer D. Callahan). Viewed through a fairly common device then, known as a stereoscope, these provided 3-D views. This would have been within a few years of the arrival of Stan and Jen, characters in “The Water Cure” and its sequels in the “People of the Water” Cycle.

This is another stereoview of Eureka Springs, specifically of the original wooden depot that served from 1882-1912. At one point it had red trim and was fondly called “the little red depot.” This is the structure that Jen, Stan and George pass as they follow the tracks walking into town early in “The Water Cure.” Stan would eventually work in the engine shop there, the shed-like structure behind the depot.