Vintage NOS 1980s Sand Springs Mineral Water Bottle Cap 💧 Williamstown MA

Remember Sand Springs Mineral Water? 💧 Vintage NOS 1980s Sand Springs Mineral Water Bottle Cap

Size: 1 1/4"

💧 A navy and silver cap with a crest of two lions under a crown, from a warm spring in Williamstown, Massachusetts, that people have been bathing in and bottling for a very long time. This one's never been on a bottle.

🔍 What's On It

Sand Springs in script across the top, a crest in the middle with two lions holding a shield under a coronet and plumes, and Mineral Spring Water along the bottom, silver on navy. Around the skirt it's printed SAND SPRINGS, INC., WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS. 01267. Inside is a molded plastic liner.

The 01267 ZIP means after 1963, and Sand Springs, Inc. is the company name registered to do business in Massachusetts from 1978. By 1986 the brand belonged to a new owner, so this cap comes from about 1978 into the mid-1980s.

🌡️ The Warm Spring

Williamstown's own historian, Arthur Latham Perry, wrote in 1894 that the "Sand Spring" had been called that "from the beginning of the town." It gushes up through the sand at the foot of the Dome, about 71 degrees all year round, warm and soft, while ordinary wells in town ran 47 degrees. He described the bottom as "like a gigantic ant-hill," with the water gurgling up through little hemispheres of sand. The first person known to swear by it was Aaron Smedley, born in 1750, a hunter whose eczema was always helped by a bath in the Sand Spring water.

Long before that it was a Mohican spring. The Stockbridge-Munsee Community describes it as an ancient Mohican spring with healing properties and great spiritual significance, and Sachem John Konkapot described visiting the springs regularly. The story goes that a French and Abenaki raiding party stopped there with their captives after burning Fort Massachusetts in 1746, and a letter in the Pittsfield Sun in 1827 claimed the spring had been curing diseases for more than a century, poison ivy included.

🏨 Resort, Bottler and Pool

By 1870 Dr. Charles Bailey of Pittsfield had built Greylock Hall beside the spring, a summer resort for 250 guests, until it burned in 1886. The 1885 county gazetteer called the Sand Springs mineral waters "famous." The bottling works has run on the site since the 1890s and has burned twice. Sand Springs Ginger Ale was a well-known soft drink for a while, and when the plant was relaunched in 1955 after a bankruptcy, the new owner bragged that Sand Springs had once been "more famous than Saratoga," and bottled it in 17 flavors plus cola, club soda, Vichy and quinine.

In 1988 Edward J. Morin, a Williamstown police officer who'd been helping run the place part time for three years, bought Sand Springs, and his family has kept it going. The same warm water fills the Sand Springs pool next door. How deep it comes from depends on who you ask: the bottler says the spring rises from 4,500 feet below and has never been known to freeze, and the pool puts it at about 2,800 feet.

📏 Details

• Vintage Sand Springs Mineral Spring Water crown bottle cap, navy and silver lion crest
• Skirt: Sand Springs, Inc., Williamstown, Mass. 01267
• Plastic lined, never crimped onto a bottle, New Old Stock
• About 1 1/4" across
• You'll get one cap like the ones shown

🖼️ It's a great one for a soda and water cap collection, a Berkshires shadow box, or anybody who grew up swimming at Sand Springs.