Take a long draw of Deer Park bottled water and you're drinking from the deep draft of Maryland history. The water is named for -- and may have even come from -- a faded community in Garrett County with a pristine peaks-and-valleys landscape in the far western claw of the state.

These days hordes of city folk from Washington, Baltimore and Pittsburgh rush around the county for winter skiing at Wisp Resort, summer skiing on Deep Creek Lake and hiking year-round at the exquisite Swallow Falls. Some might not know that there was a time when people flocked to the world-class Deer Park Hotel.

The hotel is long gone, only a few mansions are standing and weeds wave beside the railroad tracks. But the off-the-beaten-path visitor -- with a little time and much imagination -- can get a glimpse into an era when money and good times flowed in Deer Park like spring water.

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Bottled H2O is not a new fad. The restorative powers of Deer Park's abundant spring waters -- and fresh air -- were discovered by early vacationers. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, people high-tailed it there by train and horse in the summer to one of the fanciest resorts in the country. The rich stayed at the hotel. The really rich set up shop in grand Victorian mansions, modestly called "cottages."

The street names -- Main, Church, Hotel, Cemetery -- pretty much lay out life in Deer Park. Oh, yes, and Memory Lane.

There is no Water Street, but if you follow Main for a mile and a half southeast, you'll be on Boiling Spring Road and near the original source of Deer Park Water, one of the oldest bottled water companies in America. Water from the spring, which gushes forth 150,000 gallons a day, has been bottled and sold as Deer Park spring water since 1873. Today water marketed under the Deer Park brand is also drawn from Pennsylvania mountain springs.

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Like just about everything else in these parts, the spring and the bottling operation were once owned by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Bottles of Deer Park were served proudly in the dining cars. The original spring, which is not open to the public, was bought in 1993 by the Perrier Group of America. It now belongs to Nestle.

Just after the Civil War, the railroad purchased several hundred acres of land about 200 miles west of Baltimore and built a four-story, Alpine-style luxury inn. The Deer Park Hotel opened on July 4, 1873. Billed as "the most delightful summer resort of the Alleghenies," the lodge promised to be "absolutely free from malaria, hay fever and mosquitos." As its popularity grew, so did its size. Eventually there were 200 rooms and 10 cottages. Capacious suites offered baths and newfangled electric lights. Open from late June through September, the hotel offered bowling, billiards, a golf course, dinner dances, tennis, baseball, archery, trap shooting and a beautifully appointed ladies' parlor.

A glass-roofed natatorium, featuring two huge indoor swimming pools, was built in 1887. Men swam in one pool (nine feet deep), women in the other (six feet).

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A French-accented dining room menu from the 1920s features prime rib, spring chicken, ocean fish, Camembert cheese, chocolate eclairs and crepes. Each winter 25 carloads of ice were packed away in the hotel's ice house.

Sen. Henry Gassaway Davis of West Virginia, who built a cottage in Deer Park in the late 1860s, saw an entrepreneurial opportunity and constructed a handful of rental cottages on the hotel grounds. He sold those to the railroad, which built five more cottages on a nearby hill.

One of the cottages was rented every summer by the multi-term mayor of Baltimore, Ferdinand C. Latrobe. Another was reserved by a wealthy St. Louis merchant who had Deer Park water shipped to his Missouri home year round. President Grover Cleveland and his new bride, Frances Folsom, honeymooned in another of the cottages after their White House wedding in June 1886. Col. Charles H. Heyl of Washington bought a cottage in 1906. It was sold in 1927 to an order of Washington nuns, who stayed in the house each summer and sewed altar cloths and vestments. Next door, Col. Addison A. Hosmer built a summer place.

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In the early 1890s, more wealthy people, including architect Josias Pennington, erected vast summer homes, rubbing elbows with the luminaries who stayed in the hotel and the cottages: Gov. William McKinley, who went on to become president; Chinese statesman Li Hung Chang; William Jennings Bryant; Rep. Edward Crump of Tennessee; and Capt. Adrian C. Anson and his Chicago baseball team, the White Stockings, which eventually became the Chicago Cubs.

As the automobile gained momentum and train travel waned in popularity, Deer Park began to lose its luster. The stock market crash of 1929 proved to be the resort's death knell. The inn ceased operations that year and was razed in 1942.

"People came to Deer Park for its pure air and pure water," says Vonda Arnold as she putters around her cavernous, memory-packed Arnold's Store at Main and Edgewood.

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"It's sad when things tear apart," she says. She's wearing bluejeans, a red sweat shirt and wire-rims. She likes to say she's 29 going on 39 and that she's lived in Deer Park more than 50 years. "Too long," she says.

Arnold takes Deer Park history to heart. Ask nicely and she'll hunt around for some keepsakes. The town, according to a yellowed brochure she keeps under glass, is on tableland nine miles wide and 2,800 feet above sea level. There are old photos on the wall and Deer Park water for sale in the fridge.

She says the county historical society picked up essential parts of Deer Park's past -- the little gashouse, parts of a gazebo, for example -- and moved them wholesale to Oakland, the seat of Garrett County.

(You can read all about the area's history in "Deer Park, Maryland: Then and Now," a delightful booklet compiled by the Garrett County Historical Society and available at the society's headquarters in Oakland. You'll recognize the group's building -- the facade is a replica of the Deer Park Hotel front porch.)

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There is still evidence of Deer Park's prosperity. The Latrobe, the Heyl, the Hosmer and a few other grand cottages stand as silent testament to a jauntier time.

Pascal and Sandy Fontaine, owners of the Deer Park Inn -- the old Pennington Cottage -- carry on some of the hotel's traditions. It's an elegant hostelry with first-class dining.

And there's one more memory easily available to the modern-day wayfarer. Stand on the front porch of the Deer Park Inn, take a swig of Deer Park water, look out at the fields and trees to the east and you can still see lovely round hills and crystal blue skies.

Without all the hoopla and hubbub -- the golfers and bowlers and horseback riders and frequent, frenetic train whistles -- you will be able to see Deer Park in all its natural, unfiltered glory. And, without much effort, you will soon begin to understand just what attracted people here in the first place.

Sandy Fontaine decks the halls of her Deer Park Inn, one of the restored millionaire's "cottages" in once-grand Deer Park, Md.

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