Program

Legends & Lore®

Subject

Legend

Location

190 Malta Ave, Ballston Spa, NY 12020, USA

Lat/Long

43.008449, -73.843603

Grant Recipient

Saratoga County

Benjamin Franklin was a printer, inventor, statesmen, and signer of the Declaration of Independence. He had the reputation of a convivial partygoer who devoted himself to improving the nation. But did his gregariousness and patriotism extend itself to attending spiritual seances in the afterlife as a benign spirit directing mineral spring exploration? Some Ballston Spa residents say yes.

The wealthy Samuel Hides lived on his Middlebrook Farm estate on the south side of Malta Avenue, where he dabbled in Spiritualism, a system of belief centered on communication with spirits of the dead through a medium. The Spiritualist movement traces its origins to Central New York, and in Hides’s era, a community of eighty spiritualists lived in Ballston. During a séance, the supposed spirit of Benjamin Franklin revealed himself, divulging a hidden mineral spring 715 feet beneath Hides’s property, one with great medicinal value that could provide healing waters for the entire nation to enjoy. Franklin directed Hides to dig at a certain spot on his property, and when Hides hit exactly 715 feet, a hundred-foot geyser burst forth and sprayed the sky for an hour.

Hides constructed a cobblestone shelter and bottling house to aid in national distribution. The spring proved valuable and, as Franklin had foretold, provided coveted mineral waters shipped by request all over the United States. And to acknowledge his otherworldly tipster, Hides named his discovery the Hides-Franklin Spring.