Even Sullivan County’s renowned resort industry has its ties to the area’s reputation as a healing environment. Thousands of early vacationers came here as a result of the proclamation “Doctors say, ‘Go to the mountains!’””

From the earliest visits of the Lenape, who constructed their sweat lodges among the willow trees on the banks of the Delaware to the tuberculosis sufferers who searched for a cure in the cool mountain climate, hundreds of thousands of people have visited this area over the centuries because of its curative environment.

The Lenape revered the area and utilized many of the plants that grew here as medicines.

“The Indians know how to cure very dangerous and perilous wounds and sores by roots, leaves and other little things... as we are not skilled in those things, we cannot say much about them,” observed one of the first Europeans to interact with the Lenape, the Dutchman Adriaen van der Donck in 1650.

Swedish engineer Peter Lindstrom concurred, writing in “Geographia Americae” in 1656 that the herbal remedies of the Lenape people were “splendid and miraculous.”

And in 1702, Thomas Campanhius Holm wrote of the Lenape that “their medicines seem very trifling, yet their effects are astonishing, and unless a man be truly incurable, they know immediately [what] to prescribe for him; but the remedies they employ they carefully keep secret from the Christians.”

Almost 200 years later, American medical doctors were learning that there was something healing about the environment here.

Dr. Daniel Bennett St. John Roosa, a prominent New York City physician who had grown up in Bethel, was an early proponent of the natural sanitarium to be found here. Writing for the Ontario & Western Railway Vacation Guide, Roosa recalled that “many years ago, the old doctors of Sullivan County observed that the gentlemen from New York City, if at all weak in the lungs, who came in limited numbers to fish in the trout streams and hunt in the hemlock forests of what was then a wilderness, became very much stronger, and isolated cases of recovery were noted.”

Roosa’s colleague, Dr. Alfred Lebbeus Loomis, had been touting the healing qualities of the Adirondacks since his own recovery from tuberculosis there in 1867. Practicing in New York City, Loomis was looking for a place with a similarly efficacious climate that wasn’t as remote as the Adirondacks, and Roosa suggested Sullivan County. After nearly a decade of experimentation, Loomis became convinced that Roosa was right, and he decided to locate a sanitarium here for treating tuberculosis sufferers climatologically.

“Why don’t you take these people to Sullivan County and try to cure them? Some of them can be cured,” Loomis had implored those gathered at a Manhattan dinner party of wealthy New Yorkers called to raise money for the sanitarium.

Although Loomis died in 1895, the Loomis Memorial Sanitarium for Consumptives opened in Liberty in 1896 and quickly became one of the most well-known tuberculosis treatment facilities in America. Soon, dozens of imitators sprung up throughout the county, and doctors from far and wide began sending their patients here. The climatological treatment of tuberculosis was the most effective weapon against the dreaded disease in the era before antibiotics.

There seemed to be an intuitive notion at the time that the pure air, pure water and pure milk that was produced in Sullivan County was not just healthful, but healing. The Board of Directors of the Loomis facility—which, by the way, were all women—decided early on to change the name of the operation from Sanitarium to Sanatorium, a subtle but important difference. Sanitarium derives from the Latin word, sanitas, meaning health, while sanatorium comes from the Latin root sanare, meaning to heal. The change reflected an intention as well as an aspiration.

Even Sullivan County’s renowned resort industry has its ties to the area’s reputation as a healing environment. Thousands of early vacationers came here as a result of the proclamation, “Doctors Say, ‘Go to the Mountains!’”

What is today referred to as the county’s Silver Age of tourism, which lasted from about 1890 to about 1915, was based largely on that pronouncement; it was used as a promotional blurb by the Ontario & Western Railway for decades. The 200 or so hotels and thousands of farmhouses that provided accommodations to those who were commonly called “vacationists” during those years were all about offering their guests “pure air, pure water and pure milk.”

At least one Silver-Age resort, the White Sulphur Springs House, which was built in 1889, took the appeal to healing a step further, advertising its mineral springs as an odorous water “used with the most gratifying results for all kidney diseases, dyspepsia and impure blood, [which] will cure all skin diseases and nervous debility, loss of appetite and torpid liver. Also will give great relief in all cases of rheumatism, dropsy, scrofula and chronic diseases.”

Unfortunately, when the medical profession finally reached a consensus in the early 1900s that tuberculosis could be transmitted from one person to another and that word trickled down to the general public, healthy vacationers no longer wanted to ride on the trains with people suffering from the disease, who were coughing and spitting in public, and that was a major factor in the demise of the county’s Silver Age.

Nonetheless, many of the hotel owners who built the massive resort complexes of the county’s so-called Golden Age in the mid-20th century had originally come here for their health.

One family of Eastern European immigrants who came here in 1914 had scraped together $450 to purchase a ramshackle farm in Ferndale because the patriarch was seriously ill from the working and living conditions in the city. After a rough summer of farming in which they also accommodated nine boarders and grossed $81, the family decided to forsake agriculture and concentrate instead on entertaining vacationers. Thus was the world-famous Grossinger empire born, which arguably never would have happened if not for the healing environment that is Sullivan County.