HARRISON – The story goes that the top of Summit Hill is a breeding ground for bald eagles because they can catch the high winds and hover.

It was that view that apparently inspired L. Franklin Van Zelm, owner of the Summit Spring Hotel and water bottling company, to redesign the water bottle’s label in the 1930s to include the iconic eagle.

Eighty years later, the company’s newest owner and president, Bryan Pullen, has decided to pay homage to Van Zelm’s design with a limited-edition, brown bottle with a gold label featuring the bald eagle.

“He always marveled at that,” said Pullen, a pilot for US Airways who bought the 70-acre parcel including the spring from his Harrison neighbor for about $1 million in 2004.

The new design was unveiled several weeks ago and is being shipped out on a limited basis to customers throughout New England, Pullen said.

Although the water had been sold for medicinal uses since the 1870s when the Summit Hill House opened, it was Van Zelm who first used the brown bottles with the eagle label, said Taja Dockendorf, principal of T. Doc Creative in Portland and designer of the limited-edition retro label.

Van Zelm, an illustrator for the Christian Science Monitor, is credited with redesigning the label to include the eagle. In 1936, he built the beautiful spring house that encloses the water source, reviving the bottling plant that sits about 50 feet downhill and shipping the bottles to places like S.S. Pierce in Boston and even overseas.

In creating the retro label, Dockendorf said she used a variety of historical sources, including the 1930s label and an earlier 1870s red-and-blue round label to inspire her design.

“We married the two together,” Dockendorf said Thursday. The designers used a wide variety of Summit Hill historical resources dating back to the 1790s in designing the new label.

“There were so many wonderful resources,” Dockendorf said. She won a 2009 American Package Design Award for the label from Graphic Design USA.

The new design does not include the name of the town in which the spring is found. The decision to use “Maine” and not “Harrison, Maine,” was made by Pullen to focus customers across the country on the state rather than the local site.

He said the new design reflects the rich heritage of Summit Spring water, which comes from a natural, free-flowing spring close to the summit of a 900-foot hill that is considered the highest point in Cumberland County.

The water, which bubbles up through bedrock in the 80-year-old fieldstone and shaker spring house, is gravity fed to the nearby bottling facility. There is no pump; there are no bore drillings.

Geologists believe the spring is a rare bedrock fracture in which 35 million gallons of water bubble out each year from perhaps as deep as 1,000 feet straight down, Pullen said.

The Summit Spring water company bottles 300,000 gallons of water each year. The flow is so great that $1 million in water runs through the overflow pipe and out into the woods every four days. That’s $3 a second, Pullen said.

It is only one of two operating water bottling companies that is allowed to carry the state of Maine’s “Premium Grade” designation, meaning it has met strict quality and testing standards, and the first and only bottled-water company allowed membership in the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, Pullen said. The water is so pure, he said, that there is no requirement to put a nutrient label on the bottle.

“There are very few places on Earth like this spot,” Pullen said. “It’s a geological phenomenon.”