Apollinaris Spring: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Yellowstone National Park, National Park Service

Johnson, Lon; Regnier, Matthew; Osman, Zehra

Apollinaris Spring, a naturalistically designed stone water feature with a terrace, was constructed in 1925 to provide access to a natural spring. The small designed historic landscape (1/2 acre) is located adjacent to Yellowstone National Park’s Grand Loop Road Historic District, about five miles south of Indian Creek campground and about two and a half miles north of Obsidian Cliff. It is a cold, mineral-water spring that has served as a stopping place for thirsty travelers in northwestern Wyoming since at least the 1880s. A picnic area and Obsidian Creek are across the road. For decades, tourists traveling along the route stopped to partake of the calcium bicarbonate spring water. Prior to that, Native Americans used the water for medicinal purposes. D.R. Hull, chief landscape engineer for the National Park Service (NPS), recommended improving the appearance and sanitation of the spring in 1922. Three years later, Hull served as director of project with the collaboration of M.B. Hammon, sanitary engineer with the U.S. Public Health Service. Both men worked onsite; Hull planned the undertaking and designed the rockwork, and Hammon designed the watercourses. The landscape period of significance is 1925, indicating the year of masonry development to enhance the landscape of the natural Apollinaris Spring. It represents one of the earliest NPS landscape developments that used rustic-style stone construction rather than a wooden infrastructure. The masonry style utilized native stone and naturalistic placement to blend the design into the surrounding landscape, serving as a model for other park masonry projects and, in particular, spring construction work. The landscape is significance with association to areas of landscape architecture and conservation. The Apollinaris Spring site consists of a leveled terrace several feet above and approximately 35 feet to the east of the Grand Loop Road, on the stretch connecting Mammoth Hot Springs to Norris. Adjoining the road is a stone-curbed walkway 89 feet in length. The three-foot-wide walkway is constructed of blocks of white travertine. Currently, the curb consists of a single row of stones, approximately 6 inches in height. Historic photographs show a second layer of stone, now obscured by layers of asphalt overlay that would have made the original curb about 12 inches high. A dry-laid, battered stone retaining wall borders the interior of the walkway, measuring 106 feet long and 36 inches high. It is constructed of irregularly shaped and fitted, flat-faced basalt boulders of various sizes. A pair of symmetrical, gently curved stone walks with intermittently-place steps leads from the walkway to the terrace and spring. Each walk consists of three sets of risers, with landings between. The steps are constructed of slabs of white travertine with irregularly shaped basalt boulders as copings on the sides. A single riser is located at the main terrace. The oval-shaped terrace is paved with irregularly shaped, un-mortared flagstones. A naturalistic rhyolite boulder retaining wall lines the terrace. Four recessed tubes hidden in the wall throw water forward into a concrete trough, which sits in front of the wall. The raised backwall is flanked by stone seats, constructed of travertine slabs over rhyolite boulders and integrated into the retaining wall. Although the site experienced some loss due to fires in 1988 and deferred maintenance, the condition of the landscape was updated from fair to good following a 2006 preservation/restoration project. Overall, few alterations have been made to the original design, and the Apollinaris Spring landscape continues to illustrate practices of park landscape design common between 1916 and 1942.

Apollinaris Spring: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Yellowstone National Park, National Park Service

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