A postcard featuring a Curo Springs water delivery truck.
BURNICE FIEDLER COLLECTION
On a row of several bricks of the former Springwater Beverage Company, is painted “Magic City,” the nickname for South Omaha when it was an independent city.
Southwest of 13th Street and Missouri Avenue is some of South Omaha’s hilliest terrain, and within that area were the Curo Springs.
Before Curo Springs, it was known as the Medicine Springs and, still further back, as Oowanoos, the Otoe word for the “springs of eternal life.”
No one possessed more stories of the springs than Douglas County pioneer physician Dr. Harvey Link (1824-1906). He’d travel on horseback from his farm near present-day 144th and F Streets for his drinking water from the little dark ravine southeast of 19th and N Streets.
Link told of an old Native American tradition. On the bluffs near Bellevue, a battle had been fought between the Otoe and the Pawnee. After it was over and the hostile forces gone, a maiden found her lover, a stalwart young Pawnee, near death with a flint-headed arrow buried in his chest.
As World-Herald Sports Editor Sandy Griswold related the story in 1910:
She extracted the deadly shaft from the brave’s bosom, and just as he fell back fainting, he whispered the magical word:
“OǷɲԴǴDz!”
The maiden knew what this meant, and hurriedly improvising a bed of leaves for her dying lover, she darted away like a bird upon the wing. It was a long and devious way, some 8 or 9 miles up from the Bellevue bluffs to the dark little ravine in which gushed, from their rocky crypts amid the ferns, the waters the dying Pawnee craved. But with the unerring scent of the hound on the trail, the Indian girl reached the spot, and from the skin wammus (warm, fitted jackets) that encased her body, she fashioned a water bag, scooped it full of the precious liquid, and when the red sun was dropping behind the western horizon, was again at the side of her wounded sweetheart.
It is needless to say what the reader has already guessed, that the water from the Medicine Springs, the crystal, life-infusing liquid of Oowanoos, restored the young Pawnee. A wedding followed in the golden fall, and he became a chief among his kind, and she a princess among hers. They both lived long to tell the marvelous tale to their children’s children, of how the water of the Curo Springs had glorified them in the days of the long ago.
Link recalled that the fame of Curo Springs was so far-reaching that in pioneer days — every fall and spring — people from 100 miles away (some crossing the Missouri in crude boats) would come to load up with the water prized for its curative worth.
Of course, commercialization of the springs was bound to happen. In 1895, Richard O’Keefe and Denny D. Murphy established the Curo Mineral Springs of Greater Omaha on N Street. O’Keeffe was involved with the company for about 15 years, during which time its offerings expanded from bottled mineral spring water to carbonated beverages, ginger ale and soda waters. O’Keeffe (1846-1919) gained such standing in South Omaha that he was a county commissioner for 12 years and a South Omaha city council member for two.
By 1911, William W. Yager (1880-1961) was owner. That year, he built the two-story brick plant (the building is incorrectly dated as 1870 in Douglas County real estate records). A large advertisement in 1916 said Curo Springs Water was obtained from several free-flowing, sanitary-protected springs a few yards apart.
Yager added flavors such as Jersey Crème, Ironbrew and Orange Crush (not the original). The company supplied local soda fountains with liquid carbonic acid in sealed drums.
By 1932, the business went flat. The property went up on a sheriff’s sale that year and was used for a short time later in the decade for the Springwater Beverage Company. Another bottler used the building in the early 1940s and later uses included a tile company, a produce business and two concrete products businesses.
The building, listed as a storage warehouse, still has the Curo Mineral Springs sign painted on its west wall. On a row of several bricks someone sometime painted “Magic City,” the nickname for South Omaha when it was an independent city.
South Omaha had two more springs tapped for their medicinal qualities. One was on City of Omaha property at the foot of the cliff, one block south of the observatory at Mount Vernon Gardens along 13th Street. W.G. Albright, after buying the Christian Sautter homestead along the Douglas-Sarpy County line in the 1880s for development, discovered the mineral water.
While waiting to make his fledging village of Albright a great American spa (which never happened), Albright built a stone spring house around his artesian spring. He fenced off about 20 acres and posted guards to protect the water containing magnesium chloride and calcium chloride, which he pumped up the cliff and into a cistern near present-day 15th and Y Streets. The water was bottled for a time and sold on the East Coast. The stone house then was nearly forgotten, covered by landslides down the cliff, until a city foreman in 1934 spotted a trickle of water and found the stone walls and a heavy oak door.
A few blocks to the south at the base of the cliff was Mandan Springs, later known as Vista Springs, near the county line. A.H. Cooley formed the Vista Mineral Springs bottling company in 1894 — a year ahead of Curo — for the 700 gallons an hour that flowed through the main. A nickname for the site was “Tramp’s Rest,” for it provided refreshment and relaxation for those who rode the nearby Chicago, Burlington & Quincy rails without a ticket.
This column shuts off the faucet with a fable about those springs, which was the reason Mandan Park was so named by the city of South Omaha in 1908. At that time, it was believed that the Mandan tribe now in North Dakota had inhabited the area.
From the July 25, 1915, World-Herald: “Many years ago, the romance runs, Coronado, the Spanish explorer sent ahead of him when he started up the Missouri river runners to notify the Mandan Indians that he was coming and to gather the tribe at Mandan springs, as Vista springs was then called, and he would make them all very happy. Coronado had heard that there was a great city of wealth, where gold was as plentiful as pebbles on the seashore, and that the Mandan tribe controlled it. He wished to gain possession, but to do so peacefully if possible.
“As the story runs, the Mandans, who never had heard about the city of gold, sent back word that they would await the arrival of the strange brother at Mandan springs. This they did — waited long and patiently, but Coronado never came. He finally reached a spot where Falls City now stands, and there, disheartened and discouraged with reports of runners sent to investigate, turned back, for he had ascertained that the Mandans had no city of wealth and that gold was unobtainable in the locality.”
From the archives: Scroll through some of our neatest old photos – 1854-1930
On a row of several bricks of the former Springwater Beverage Company, is painted “Magic City,” the nickname for South Omaha when it was an independent city.