Travelling to the Baths

Most spa guests stayed in Uddevalla. Early in the morning, they travelled along the steep, rutted country road to Gustafsberg, where they remained until evening.
The usual means of travel was horse and carriage. Regular carriage services were established in the 1830s.
Steamboat services between Uddevalla and Gustafsberg began in the late 1840s. The route is still served today by the archipelago boats. The oldest vessel in service is Gustafsberg II, built in 1898.
The Bohus Line railway opened in 1908 with a special stop for spa guests at Höjentorp. The large steamboat pier is nearby. Across the bay is the small steamboat pier, which is now used by the archipelago boats.
Two floating bathing pools lay out in the bay, one for women and one for men. Bath attendants rowed the guests out to them. In winter, the rafts were pulled ashore. They were last used for bathing in 1910, when they were sold for use as woodsheds and playhouses.

Spa guest Ebba Hildebrand writes to her brother-in-law Bror Emil Hildebrand:

In the letter, we can read, among other things, about Bishop Tegnér’s arrival at the Gustafsberg steamboat pier:

“24 July 1837.
Monday. On Saturday evening, the steamship Platen arrived from Gothenburg carrying Bishop Tegnér.
The entire spa company streamed down to the pier to greet the ship and the bishop. The former merely gave off its usual smell of oat-soup steam; the latter looked sleepy, sly and dull-eyed.

Yesterday there was a grand ball in the spring hall. More than 200 people crowded, pushed, flailed and sweated in the low, dark box, while the most glorious countryside in the loveliest evening light went unnoticed outside. I have never enjoyed Gustafsberg less than I do now. There are far too many people; one is never at ease, and people never gather for any reason other than tea and dancing, just as in Stockholm. In the mornings they pay calls on one another in rooms draped with skirts and surrounded by travelling trunks, and in the evenings they walk in long lines along the sandy paths between the hop poles, then crawl into the low, dark hovel to drink tea. Walks by land or sea are out of the question. Hildebrand and I sometimes walk alone to the Master’s and Knape’s viewpoints; that is the most enjoyable part of it all.

But it would be unfair of me to expect Hildebrand to run over hills and slopes as I would like to do if I had some mischievous young girl to accompany me. Oh, if only Eva Stackelberg were here instead of in Strömstad! If Baroness Lind’s example did not deter me, I would wander alone throughout the district, since no one wishes to see it with the same eyes as I do. The latter was Axianne, wife of Lieutenant Colonel C. A. L. Lind af Hageby. The hop garden in which people walked formed part of today’s upper park, and the “hovel” was evidently the inn’s dining room. Ebba’s opinion that the spa guests showed too little interest in nature was not shared by a more objective observer, as we shall shortly learn.”

Mrs Ebba had brought her dear Hanna, Johanna Christina Salin, who had been her own nursemaid and was now nursemaid to her children. Hanna now “followed them along the paths and to the playgrounds where she had so often watched” Ebba and her siblings. Ebba’s husband was probably unable to climb the hills as much because he was a full 22 years older than his wife.

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Facts about Tegnér

Bishop Esaias Tegnér

Esaias Tegnér, the national poet and Bishop of Växjö since 1824, made a brief visit to Gustafsberg in July 1837 to see his two daughters, Baroness Göthilda Rappe and her husband, and the widowed Mrs Disa Kuhlberg, all three of whom were spa guests at Gustafsberg. Tegnér arrived from his spa treatment in Gothenburg aboard the steamship Amiral von Platen, commanded by naval lieutenant Hasselberg. The vessel had also visited Gustafsberg the previous year, in 1836.

The Bishop’s Amusements

Tegnér had two diversions at Gustafsberg: paying court to various ladies and taking part in evening readings for a small circle, as in Malla’s time. An anecdote told by C. W. Skarstedt, which I reproduced in the book about Uddevalla, shows that he also occasionally socialised with gentlemen alone at the inn. A grammar-school teacher in Uddevalla, who was also curate in a neighbouring parish, dared to invite Tegnér to an elegant late-morning collation. Tegnér became particularly high-spirited and made several mildly witty remarks. However excellent the baths may have been, the social life at Gustafsberg can hardly have been a suitable environment for the physically frail poet, despite accounts of the resort’s pleasures in the Handbook for Spa Guests published that same year.

Tegnér had the opportunity to associate with another poet at Gustafsberg in the summer of 1841. Wilhelm von Braun’s name does not appear anywhere in the newspaper that year, but he himself wrote of his stay. He related that in midsummer 1841 he was taking the waters in Gothenburg, where he met Tegnér, who was staying there as a spa guest and firmly advised von Braun against drinking the fattening mineral water. “Following the advice given,” von Braun wrote, “I soon sent the Carlsbad water packing,” and within a week I had the honour of seeing Tegnér again at the Gustafsberg resort, to which he had travelled from Gothenburg. There I saw him almost daily, but never again afterwards…