{"id":147435,"date":"2022-06-17T16:12:31","date_gmt":"2022-06-17T20:12:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=147435"},"modified":"2023-01-24T13:45:24","modified_gmt":"2023-01-24T18:45:24","slug":"whats-in-a-name-montello","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2022\/06\/17\/whats-in-a-name-montello\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s in a Name: Montello"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A residential area just north of campus, Montello is the name of a street, a rise of land (familiar to generations of Bates joggers), an elementary school, a former reservoir, and an assisted living center.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Street wise<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

One of Lewiston\u2019s oldest streets, Montello Street connects Main Street on the west side of town with Sabattus Street to the east.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Naming rights<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Other Montello-named places in the U.S. include a neighborhood in Brockton, Mass.; a canyon and creek in Nevada; and a town in Wisconsin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some sources suggest \u201cMontello\u201d is based on the French, \u201cmont et l\u2019eau<\/em>,\u201d meaning \u201chill and water,\u201d which seems fanciful. More likely, the name is borrowed from the hill of the same name in northern Italy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

New heights<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Since the 1800s, the area around Montello Street has been known as Montello Heights. The street rises and falls about 150 feet through the heights, crossing College Street. North of the street, the land is still mostly undeveloped woodland, including Thorncrag, rising another 150 feet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spring has sprung<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

As bottled water became popular in the 1800s, commercial bottlers like Poland Spring sprang up throughout Maine, including two in Montello Heights whose water was once sold nationally: Windsor Spring was on the west side, and Highland Spring was on the east side, on land that became the Thorncrag Nature Sanctuary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Water from the Windsor Spring, located in Montello Heights, was sold during the late 1800s in bottles like this, featuring a stereotypical scene of indigenous peoples drinking from a spring. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The New York Daily Tribune<\/em> in 1900 praised Highland Spring water as “a delicious, pure, natural spring water, which wells forth from a never-failing mountain spring in Androscoggin County, Maine.” The paper said “several carloads of this water were shipped South for the use of Red Cross nurses in Cuba and in the infected camps of the South during the [Spanish-American] war.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was endorsed by none other than leading Lewiston citizen Alonzo Garcelon<\/a>, a physician who said that he “never knew of a case of malarial fever to originate in that state \u2014 a very important consideration in the selection of a drinking water.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
An 1887 advertisement for Windsor Mineral Springs in the Lewiston\u2013Auburn business directory proclaims that the water, sourced at Montello Heights, is good for any “general debility.”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Water Works<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Built in 1951, Montello Heights Reservoir was closed as a public water source in the 1980s after the city improved its pumping stations. All public water now comes from Lake Auburn. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Happy Trampers<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

In the early 1900s, north of campus was mostly farmland. In 1918, The Bates Student <\/em>reported that seniors in a zoology course trekked to a Montello Heights farmhouse for a snowshoe party. \u201cThe trampers enjoyed an oyster stew, apple pie with whipped cream, coffee, apples, and pop-corn.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Montello Street is now part of a traditional three-mile jogging loop: out College Street; right on Montello; right on East Avenue, and back to campus. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A residential area just north of campus, Montello is the name of a street, a rise of land familiar to generations of Bates joggers, and once home to two commercial mineral springs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":104,"featured_media":147441,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[10830,11507],"class_list":["post-147435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lewiston-auburn","tag-lewiston-auburn","tag-whats-in-a-lewiston-name"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/104"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147435"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":147452,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147435\/revisions\/147452"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}