[7] Circa 1917 a man named Thomas W. Moore owned an unexploited similar spring on the east side of the valley, where water flowed from "soft clay below a limestone ledge.

[10] After European colonization, the springs were named in honor of Saint Veronica by the Catholic friars of Mission Santa Barbara.

"[8] The naturalist Thomas Nuttall is believed to have made a number of his Santa Barbara-area collections of 1836 "in sandy woodland probably about Veronica Springs.

"[12] Booster and journalist Charles Nordhoff mentioned "numerous hot and cold springs" in the Santa Barbara area in his writings about California in the 1870s.

[13][11] As a regional history told it in 1917, "About the year 1870 a gentleman who had married the daughter of one of the early Californians and through her, had learned the value of Veronica Springs water, sought to interest the white man in commercializing the same but without success, until about the year 1880, when a couple of prominent Santa Barbarans agreed to finance the proposition in a small way, as they had but little faith in its merits.

In 1895 he went East with the first carload of it and opened offices in Philadelphia, and from this small beginning Veronica water has found its way around the entire world.

"[14] Bottled Veronica water that was shown at the 1892 Santa Barbara fair by one Henry Clifton was said to have "wonderfully curative properties" and to look as "clear and limpid as a moonbeam.

"[10] Under Kimball, the company also leaned heavily on testimonials, placing ads that included lengthy positive reviews from specific customers.

[10] The World War I era was ironically a high point for California mineral waters, in part because druggists were trying to replace products that could no longer be obtained from Europe.

[31] The springs were still producing water after World War II,[32] and there were plans to offer "hydrotherapy" treatments at the site for people with arthritis or high blood pressure.

A restoration of the riparian habitat surrounding Arroyo Burro creek is underway, and the land is now a natural area open to the public.

[13] U.S. government geologist Gerald A. Waring described Veronica Springs in 1915 as "situated on the sides of the wide drainage channel of San Roque Creek, about three-quarters of a mile northward from the ocean.

The remarkably high content of magnesia...seems to have been produced by concentration of the material from the ocean water by some means which is not clearly understood but which probably involved the evaporation of the water of lagoons to a bittern...The flat-topped hills on whose flanks the springs issue are composed of shales of late Tertiary age that probably belong to the Fernando formation, which has been described by Arnold.