Clifton Springs Sanitarium Historic District

This cluster of buildings and grounds on East Main Street in Clifton Springs preserves what remains of the Clifton Springs Sanitarium, a medical institution that shaped the village from the mid-nineteenth century into the early twentieth. Dr. Henry Foster founded it as a water cure in 1849. The district includes the Foster Cottage (1854), the Foster Block (1865), the YMCA (1879), the five-story brick sanitarium of 1896, Maxwell Hall (1926) and the Woodbury Building (1927), plus part of the original landscaped grounds. The sanitarium's chapel holds a Tiffany favrile glass mosaic of the Last Supper. The institution blended religious, allopathic, homeopathic and water-cure practices, which the nomination describes as unusual. Some features were lost, including two open-air pavilions, and the main building was altered in 1974. The complex nevertheless keeps nearly all its original buildings in their historic relationships. Its institutional descendant, the Clifton Springs Hospital and Clinic, continues on the site.