It all began, as the best things about community sometimes do, by the most unlikely of encounters.

C.M. "Clayt" Woerth, a Philadelphia trolley conductor traveling through Lancaster County, pulled off the highway and wandered into Nickel Mines for some ice.

He fell in love with the southern Lancaster County crossroads in Bart Township, so much so that he moved there and started a corner grocery store at the community's main intersection.

Woerth wanted to give something back to his new home, so in 1947 he put up the money for a community swimming pool. Every family from Christiana to Ronks, it seemed, joined the nonprofit, community-run Nickel Mines Community Club.

A pool was built next to a dammed creek, where village kids had splashed around for years. Volunteers built a picnic grove, playground and ball park that produced an amateur baseball team that challenged all takers. A pavilion was added later, and a large pond for boating and fishing.

"It was all spring water so you know that's cold," recalls Doris Woerth, a relative of the the late Clayt Woerth. She taught swimming classes at the pool while attending college.

Residents joked that Nickel Mines, population 25, had its own country club.

There were poolside night dances. Kids spent childhoods at the pool, grew up and took their kids to the members-only complex surrounded by Amish mules and farm fields.

One such couple, Dan and Fritz Baughman, managed the pool for 17 years, then leased it, then bought it. In the mid-1990s, they sold it to their two sons, John and Dan Baughman.

"They ran a tight ship but it was nice," says Calvin D. Keene, a Bart Township supervisor. "They wouldn't allow anybody in they thought was going to make trouble or disturb the people there."

"It was a great community thing to have. Woerth did that for the community."

It was a continuum that seemed timeless and endless.

But few things are, and the swimming pool began to falter, its facilities frayed. Reluctantly, the Baughmans put the pool up for sale about five years ago.

About that time, Audra and Merrill Spahn of Strasburg Township were vacationing with their family in Ocean City, Md. They spent a day in a water park and had a ball.

"It was good exercise and multi-generational and I thought we needed something mini like this in our area," recalls Audra Spahn, who owns two child-care centers in York.

Why, there's a swimming pool for sale just down the road, she was told. Although she lived just six miles away from Nickel Mines, like many people outside the community, she didn't know of the pool's existence.

She and her husband, a criminal defense attorney in Lancaster, bought the pool in February 2006. They renamed it the Splashes Swim Club and completely updated the complex, even adding a heater to warm the goose-bump-provoking spring and well water.

"We knew it was a gamble, but we had to give it a try," she says Wednesday inside the locked snack bar and changing room building.

"I just felt like it was this little gem in the middle of the country, the kind of place where memories are made."

To promote the pool as a family-fun destination, Audra added craft nights for kids, wireless Internet service and cable television.

But though memberships initially tripled from 100 to more than 300, the Spahns were forced to raise the annual fees. That, along with the remote location and escalating gas prices, hurt, Audra says.

No one ever said so, but she wonders also if the shootings of the 10 little girls at the Amish schoolhouse directly across the road in October 2006 also was a factor.

"I know it was hard for us to drive by for months. It was just too painful," she says.

Painfully, reluctantly, the Spahns have put the Splashes Swim Club up for public auction at 11 a.m. Saturday, March 29, at the site at 4915 White Oak Road. Besides the swim complex and pond, the site includes 14 acres, including woods.

A spokesman for Jennings Auction Group (jenningsauction.com) says most interest has been "as just a piece of land."

But Audra Spahn holds out hope the little swim community in the country will continue. A group that runs other swimming pools has made contact.

"It shouldn't have to end this way," she says.

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