Polish Association of Balneology and Physical Medicine

TAKING THE WATERS IN TEXAS: SPRINGS, SPAS, AND FOUNTAINS OF YOUTH

HISTORICAL WATERING TRADITION

JANET MACE VALENZA, PH.D.

I am an oasis in the busy world where the cosmopolite may find a fellow from whatsoever clime or country. I possess the health-giving properties which no modern scientist has been able to compound. I am the finisher of all the ailments of the human economy. I am the builder of flesh and bone. All but make the dead stand up and shout, “Oh thou fountain of youth….” Fate gave to the world but one of a kind. I am Tioga.

-W.A. McDonald, 1919

When I flew to England one summer, I expected to see the spa tradition in full bloom. Instead, I saw relics of watering days in museums of the once-famous resort towns of Harrogate, Cheltenham, Malvern, and Bath. An interesting and active corollary to these neglected resorts, however, is the still-honored place of holy wells throughout the countryside.

During medieval times in Great Britain many wells considered sacred to the Druids, or viewed as the abodes of nymphs or gods by the Romans, were dedicated to Christian saints. Each spring or well gained a reputation for healing certain afflictions. Saint Ann, for instance, became the patron saint of the spring at Great Malvern, where women suffering from infertility sought relief.

I visited the Binsey Church outside of Oxford. It is a simple country church with surrounding graveyard. The last royal visitors were Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. They must have visited because the well water was said to restore fertility and to the good for the eyes and stomach. In the middle of the cemetery were four steps carved into the ground with a concrete marker above denoting “St. Margaret’s Well.” I was sure that the setting contributed to the mystery of the well. On a country road surrounded by pastureland, this unassuming, ancient church conveyed a sense of tranquility and timeless secrets. I felt connected to the spirits of those who had come before, hoping for miracles, just as they followed in the footsteps of those who had come before them. This chain of expectations made the journey to the waters as important as the “taking” of the waters.

The one place where I had expected to take the waters-Bath-had closed its doors to bathers in the 1980s, although I could at least drink the mineralized water from a spigot in the museum.

In the late 1700s, the city parents of Bath, the spa town immortalized in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, had rediscovered the old roman baths that underlay Georgian and Victorian structures in the city. Much of the infrastructure-the heated floors, the lead pipes, and the foundations for the plunges, saunas, and Turkish baths- remained intact despite the neglect of the past 1,600 or so years. The hot mineral springs (the only ones in England) had been valued for 5,000 years before the Romans invaded, but the Romans fully developed the springs in about 60-70 A.D. and even incorporated the local deity, Sulis, in the name, Aquae Sulis. They built a large complex comprising a frigidarium (cold bath), tepidarium (warm bath), caldarium (hot bath), and exercise court. They also perfected the hypocaust, or cavity floor, through which hot air circulated.

The Sacred Spring supplied the baths with water. The Romans ingeniously built a reservoir to hold the water, and it subsequently became the site for offerings to the gods. Excavation revealed thousands of coins and votive offerings, including curses written on pewter to bring retribution to an enemy (and now displayed in the Roman Bath Museum), such as:

May he who stole my cloak, whether he be man or woman, boy or girl, freedman or slave, become impotent and die. It many have been…

Although there seemed to be little acknowledgment of the waters’ present-day value, there was a substantial interest in their cultural value, emphasizing a tradition that began before the Romans. Archaeological discoveries around many springs throughout the world, in fact, include pictographs denoting healing and other shamanistic practices. Recorded references of their influence in the history of Western civilization begins with the Greeks.

EUROPE

In classical Greece, waters with distinct tastes, smells, or colors often represented the abodes of gods and spirits. People erected altars near sacred springs where they celebrated recovery by placing crutches, bandages, and replicas of diseased organs around their edges. Coins or small objects thrown into the water served as tokens of supplication or gratitude. By the fifth century B.C. the cult of Asclepius established temples near springs, such as those at Epidaurus, Cos, Corinth, and Pergamum. The temples, or the Asclepia, housed spas, baths, and places for recreation and worship- the first holistic treatments centers. Later, Hippocrates classified waters as sulphur, salt, effervescent, alum, and bituminous, according to taste, smell, and appearance, a classification still largely in use today.

The Romans also believed in the restorative powers of springs. Vitruvius, a Roman architect, observed that patients recovered more quickly if they frequented temples built near sacred water sources. In the first century A.D. the Romans founded more than one hundred bathing places throughout the Empire. Among the more famous were Bath and Buxton (Aquae Arnemetiae, the original Latin name) in England; Baden-Baden (Aurelia Aquensis) and Aachen (Aquae Grani) in Germany; Aix-les-Bains (Aquae Gratianae), Vichy (Aquae Calidae), and Bagneres de Luchon in France; and Baden (Vicus Aquarum) in Switzerland. Military hospitals for wounded soldiers sprang up at many bath sites. Luxurious baths in imperial Rome, such as Caracalla, accommodated more than three thousand people at a time. They were complex structures involving rooms with cold or tepid waters, some with hot air, areas for exercise, and a stadium and gardens.

In Europe bathing rose and fell in social importance, depending on the century. From the thirteenth century onward baths as places of entertainment figured prominently in the homes of prosperous citizens. Patients and guests spent two to twelve hours in mineral baths, snacking from floating tables and playing chess. They spent so much time bathing that they often fell asleep in the waters and occasionally drowned. From the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, with the spread of epidemics such as syphilis (carried in from the Americas) and the plague (from the Near East), more and more people became afraid of sharing baths. The communal tradition faded. Hygiene subsequently declined.

In the 1700s, spas resumed their earlier social role. Resorts in England figured importantly in the evolution of polite society, expressed in manners and behavior. Beau Nash, for example, a self-proclaimed social arbiter, dictated fashion at Bath, and any aspiring socialite spent a season there. Beginning in 1702, Queen Anne’s visits to Bath spurred rapid urban development. Social life in that city revolved around the watering schedule. The daily routine began with a bath between 6:00 and 9:00 A.M., followed by breakfast and water consumption in the Pump Room until 11:00 A.M., morning service in the Abbey, dinner at 2:00 or 3:00 p.m., riding, walking, and window-shopping until returning to the Pump Room at 5:00 p.m. In the evening, a ball, concert, gambling, or the theater provided entertainment. Such routines varied little from what unfolded years later in North America.

THE UNITED STATES

New England

America’s bathing tradition largely originated in England. Colonists knew about spas and consequently recognized the value of natural springs along the Atlantic coast. Pilgrims discovered Stafford Springs in Connecticut from a tribe of Indians, the Nipmucks, who used the springs in summer. Although many springs dotted the area, Stafford became the first resort in the Northeast. The late blossoming of northern resorts resulted from the Puritan influence in New England. Many immigrants came from the south and east of England, where the use of holy wells and springs had been suppressed during the Reformation. In 1771, John Adams wrote in his diary about Stafford Springs:

The water is very clear, limpid, and transparent; the rock and stones and earth, at the bottom are tinged with a reddish yellow color, and so is the little wooden gutter, that is placed at the mouth of the spring to carry the water off; indeed the water communicates that color, which resembles that of the rust of iron, to whatever object it washes…They have built a shed over a little reservoir, made of wood, about three feet deep, and into that have conveyed the water from the Spring; and there the people bathe, wash, and plunged, for which Child has eight pence a time. I plunged twice, but the second time was superfluous, and did me more hurt than good; it is very cold indeed.

In the nineteeth century Saratoga, New York, one of the country’s most celebrated watering places, grew famous among many Texans, who compared it to their resorts. Its history as a spa reportedly began in 1767 when Mohawk Indians carried Sir William Johnson, diplomat to the Iroquois, to Saratoga to cure his gout. Later, several physicians examined the medicinal benefits of its waters, debating the possible therapeutic value of the recent discovery of carbon dioxide- or fixed air, as it was called. When a hotel opened in 1803, Saratoga became the resort in vogue. From about 1820 “cards, billiards, and dancing, all terrible instruments of perdition, were introduced… By 1835 Saratoga had become an acknowledged center of gambling.” Promenades, balls, and horse racing effectively elevated this site to a major social center in the mid-1800s. Transformation from an early religious retreat, where the first temperance society met in 1808, to a secular entertainment center was complete. The springs remained popular until the early 1900s when the elite in society headed off to beach resorts and bathing in the sea. During Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, Saratoga became a federal reservation.

Pennsylvania possessed many famous spas. Bedford Springs, James Buchanan’s summer White House, attracted prominent Americans. Yellow Springs, later called Chester, near Philadelphia was an opulent establishment by colonial standards. In the 1770s, houses, thirty-five by eighteen feet, enclosed its three baths and contained drawing rooms, fireplaces, and sash windows. During the Revolution, this resort served as George Washington’s headquarters, providing facilities for wounded soldiers. The value of Bristol’s waters, near Philadelphia, was acknowledged by the medical profession after Dr. John De Normandie chemically analyzed them in 1768, found them to be diuretic, and studied case histories of patients who had benefited from the springs. Benjamin Rush, M.D., was impressed by the place and had written a paper titled “Experiments and Observations on the Mineral Waters of Philadelphia, Abington, and Bristol” in which he described diseases the water might alleviate. He was particularly impressed by the therapeutic value of water from one well- which was later found to be contaminated by sewage. Rush did warn, however, that “mineral water, like most of our medicines, are only substitutes for temperance and exercise in chronic diseases. An angel must descend from Heaven, and trouble these chalybeate pools, before we can expect an extraordinary effect from their use alone.”

Northern resorts were typified by the grandeur and opulence of such spas as Saratoga and later those in the Colorado Rockies and along the California coast. Primarily attracting an urban clientele, they exhited an antebellum style, usually including a piazza surrounded by a colonnade several stories high in front of a tall structure. Buildings like the Catskill Mountain House, the Pavilion Hotel at Sharon Springs, New York, and several hotels at Saratoga reflected this Greek Revivalist style. Northern resorts also included tree-lined streets, promenades, and semipublic parks.

THE SOUTH

Whereas northern resorts centered around cities and parks, antebellum southern resorts focused on western Virginia and emphasized outdoor recreation and a romantic attitude toward society and nature. The built landscape underwent several transformations. In early days spa facilities comprised simple log cabins or frame boardinghouses. Only when pleasure-seeking overwhelmed health concerns did the grand hotels emerge. Many southern springs offered only one hotel, fronting a park with surrounding cabins, in which clientele spent the summer partaking of the waters. This particular tradition exemplified architecture and site planning promoted by Thomas Jefferson. The model originated with Italy’s Palladian style, adapted by Jefferson, who stressed the symmetrical placement of the main house with smaller cabins and springhouses. This southern tradition, simple and rural, also influenced American resort architecture after the Civil War.

These spas played a large part in the lives of colonials, encouraged social mixing, and provided a venue for political maneuvers. In particular, they facilitated social contact between the planter aristocracy and backwoodsmen. By around 1760, when colonial gentry began a seasonal migration to spas, their families had accumulated extra fund and had more time to travel. City noise and a fear of summer fevers and unhealthful air also prompted this exodus to rural spas.

Most of Virginia’s springs issued from the Allegheny Mountains, on the edge of the frontier in early colonial times. In 1748 George Washington visited Bath, the western Virginia resort named after its English counterpart, and bathed in its brush-surrounded springs. In 1761 he returned to it (by then it had been renamed Berkeley Warm Springs) to relieve pains from rheumatic fever. Thomas Jefferson likewise frequented springs and described some medicinal waters in Berkeley County. Jefferson even suggested that the state purchase White Sulphur Springs (now in West Virginia) for the “common good.”

It became customary to tour the springs. By the early 1800s, the rude accomodations of Berkeley and Warm Springs were replaced in spa-goers’ affections by Virginia’s opulent lodgings at White Sulphur Springs, Salt Springs, Sweet Springs, and Red Sulphur Springs. These frontier springs, a substantial distance from settlements, attracted several thousand visitors during July and August. The travelers would begin their journey at Warm Springs, the most northeastern resort in the cluster, and journey 170 miles to visit all the area’s springs. Colonel Fry, the amiable host of Warm Springs, would tell his guest to “go, (said he,) and get well charged at the White Sulphur, well-salted at the Salt, well sweetened at the Sweet, well boiled at the Hot and then let them return to him and he would Fry them.” Six weeks and many gallons of mineral water later, they would converge on the Warm by the last week of August.

All these springs attracted both northerners and southerners, but some groups in particular. South Carolina’s rice coast planters preferred the Salt Sulphur, while Tidewater Virginians preferred the Sweet. The Southern planters who repudiated Jacksonian Democracy railed against the government at the White Sulphur. Wherever they went, social activities usually included billiards, boxing, gambing (particular the card game of faro), horse racing, shooting, the occasional duel, and dancing. Dancing, in fact, became so popular that the master of ceremonies at White Sulphur’s ballroom created the Billing, Wooing, and Cooing Society to make the proper introductions and promote dance etiquette. After the Civil War, even Robert E. Lee often escorted the young ladies to dances and parties and did the Treadmill, a type of parlor promenade of two or three people abreast.

In American resorts, at least until 1825, health was the primary concern of patrons, followed by religion, then gambling. Southern spas, in addition, became famous for their recreational pursuits. By the twentieth century, social activities were similar to those of the preceding century. Commentator Katharine Dos Passos described the annual ritual of “taking the waters:”

Going away for the summer has always been an American habit and in the early nineteenth century “the young, the gay, the handsome and agreeable of both sexes” began seeking out these springs. An ancient sophisticated ritual of fun and fashion was set up like a little traveling theater in the flowering America wilderness.

She further alluded to the opulence and grandeur of these resorts:

Stately hotels of brick and stone wih white columns and Greek porticoes rose among the freshly cleared forests. There were wood fires “big enough to roast an ox” in the simple cabins of the guests but there were Brussels carpets too, and Paris fashions, European wines, music and dancing.

Harrison Rhodes, an observer of American holidays, described fellowship as “good-natured, well-bred, and idle, inclined to prefer Bourbon whisky to the water from the spring, and apt to know a good poker hand when its sees one.” He suggested that the resorts’ prime historical function was as a marriage mart- to find eligible gentlemen for unwed daughters. The cult of the “Southern Belle” reigned at the springs even after the Civil war and continued until the 1920s.

THE WEST

Whereas inaccessibility to Virginia’s isolated resorts enhanced their attraction, the popularity of a spring site in the West depended to a great extent on available transportation. In the 1880s, railroads built the great hotels of the West as they strove to promote western spas: the Southern Pacific built Del Monte in Montery; the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe constructed the Montezuma Hotel in Las Vegas Hot Springs, New Mexico; the Denver and Rio Grande developed the Antlers Hotel in Colorado Springs.

Travel, reserved for the elite until the 1880s and 1890s, opened in the late nineteenth century to more middle-class Americans who finally could afford western travel. The popularity of the Pullman sleeping car and the rate wars of the 1880s made mass travel possible. By that time also the central and western areas sported fancy hotels, although the typical invalid could not afford a long resort stay.

The medical establishment played an important role in promoting Colorado as a health resort because of its mountains, considered particularly health-promoting. Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs, called the Saratoga of the West, attracted 30,000 resort-goers by 1880 and 200,000 by 1890. In Colorado’s more remote watering places, however, visits of two or three days sufficed as tour agencies arranged short stops for transcontinental passengers on their way to Southern California. Also around the turn of the century California competed with Colorado for health-seekers.

Although written documentation is sparse, there is enough evidence to reveal that Native Americans considered California’s springs to be sacred environments. The Geysers in Sonoma County and Coso Hot Springs in Inyo County particularly attracted Native Americans from far away. Palm Springs Cahuila chief Patencio believed that hot springs, used by shamans in healing ceremonies, were doors to the underworld: “Now the Indian people know that all hot springs, everywhere, are joined together under the ground by passageways.” The Wappo constructed scaffolding of willow and brush over the steam vents of the Geysers, and the Paiute supposedly buried their dead at a hot springs in the northeastern part of the state.

California’s resort towns with mineral or hot springs included Calistoga, Santa Barbara, Lake Arrowhead, Lake Elsinore, Palm Springs, and Desert Hot Springs, some of the earliest spas that became famous during the Health Rush, encompassing the thirty years after the Gold Rush of 1849. Because of poor transportation and a sparse population, California’s springs generally remained unknown until later in the century.

Invalids, estimated as one fourth of all settlers in Southern California, brought more income into the state. It was largely healthseekers who tripled the state’s population between 1870 and 1900. The opening of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 facilitated mass migration. Experts from Europe and the eastern U.S. then began to classify medicinal waters for the California State Board of Health.

California attracted its share of healthseekers, and a building boom began that peaked by the 1890s. At that time Winslow Anderson, M.D., boasted of two hundred hot and cold mineral waters within the state. California’s mineral waters and climate drew spa aficionados who also sought an arcadian ideal in the hills and valleys of the state. Many resorts sought to embody the romance of southern California. They planted palm trees, emblematic of the ideal resort, and publicized past Indian and missionary use of the waters.

A NATIONAL RESORT TRADITION

Promoters continued to sell “romance” at their spas throughout the nineteenth century. As regional differences became indistinguishable, other commonalities among resorts after the Civil War includes long verandas (typical at seaside hotels), rambling site plans, loosely connected wings, a greater integration of buildings with surrounding grounds, and an emphasis on courtyards and connecting walkways. Much of this style and layout in the South exemplified the Jeffersonian tradition with connecting walkways between cottages, similar to his campus plan of the University of Virginia.

Historian Cleveland Amory regards 1908 as the heyday of the big eastern resorts. At that time a “Grand Tour” included the Berkshires in the fall, Hot Springs, Arkansas, or White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, in the late fall or spring, and Palm Beach, Florida, for the winter. To be sure, by the late 1940s most eastern resorts appeared idle while western resorts such as Palm Springs, Colorado Springs, and Reno prospered. The grand resort had changed into a more recreation-oriented atmosphere where mineral water held little value for pleasure-seekers.

During World War II, one last hope for some health spas lay in military plans for rehabilitation of wounded soldiers. According to the Committee on Health Resorts of the American Medical Association, the chronic disease most often treated at spas included heart and circulatory disorders (31 percent), rheumatic conditions (24 percent), and gastrointestinal ailments (18 percent). It was hoped that the health of wounded soldiers, who also suffered from these ailments, might improve with water therapy. Though many spa facilities were considered (including reports on seventeen spas in Texas), the United States Army Medical Corps established only two water-therapy hospitals: at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and at Hot Springs, Arkansas. Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy founded a hospital at Glenwood Springs, Colorado, where its doctors utilized what was supposedly the world’s

largest mineral water swimming pool and set up natural fever therapy rooms over mountainside caves where warm water circulated through troughs in the floor. Finally, the Veterans Administration planned to develop treatment facilities at Saratoga Springs, New York; Hot Springs, South Dakota; Mineral Springs (Wells), Texas; Hot Springs, Utah; and Excelsior Springs, Missouri. Many of the plans, however, either were never executed or failed to ensure the continued prosperity of these resorts.

Not every locality could afford a massive infusion of capital to build in a grand style. Every state (except North Dakota) boasted mineral springs, but not all of these water sources featured the “improvements” of shelter or facilities. Most facilities at the estimated one thousand improved springs and wells in the United States (and its territories) in the 1880s likely included only a modest hotel, boarding house, or bathhouse. Some were improved with merely a canvas to cover their waters. Nevertheless, with modest buildings, resorts could still meet the needs of a water-seeking public who wanted simple, inexpensive access to medical therapy.

Compilations of spas never agreed on numbers, much less the tally of improved springs. In the early 1880s, the American Medical Association, for example, noted 500 spa localities, while A. Peale tabulated 2,822 localities with 634 spas. By contrast, more than 900 improved mineral springs existed in France, 1,200 in Spain, 300 in Italy, 100 in England, and 2,500 in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Though the United States possessed several thousand springs, few waters received the medical acknowledgment that those in Europe did. Most, in fact, remained unknown except to a loyal local contingent of healthseekers.

TEXAS’ SPAS

As inland watering places in the eastern part of the nation declined in number and popularity, those in Texas blossomed. Most early listings of American spas recorded only a handful in Texas. An 1880 report to the American Medical Association on mineral springs listed only Burdette, Kellum, Piedmont, and Cardwell Springs in the state. Yet by that time more than forty Texas springs had been “improved.” The resorts that drew the most visitors- Lampasas, Sour Lake, and Hynson Springs- received no listing whatsoever.

Most observers disagreed on the number of spas in Texas. In 1892 physician G. Walton recorded 67 spas in the northeastern United States, 30 in the Midwest, 38 in the West, and 89 in the South, with only three in Texas (Piedmont, Fairview, and White Sulphur). That same year, another physician W. Anderson, noted 206 important watering places in the West, 24 in the Midwest, 47 in the South, and 29 in the Northeast. Although this was a peak time in Texas for spas, he found none. In 1893, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Mineral Resources of the U.S. provided a more accurate count. It recognized the value of many mineral springs:

Both for commercial purposes and as places of resort…there is scarcely a State in the country which is without its mineral-spring resorts of recognized medicinal value, which are sources of profit to the owners of the springs and, therefore, indirectly, an addition to the wealth of their localies.

Thereafter the author listed thirty resorts in Texas.

By 1927, in the United States as a whole, W. E. Fitch, M.D., reported 425 flowing spring areas, 240 of which had been popular resorts fifty years earlier and then abandoned. Fitch further reported that only 25 spring areas in Texas qualified as resorts. He named 17 “Great American Health Resorts,” which offered “all the comforts of a home, all the service of the best hotel and all the advantages of the best sanitarium, with every comfort, convenience and luxury to be had at any spa in the world.” There were three in Virginia and in West Virginia; two in Indiana and in New York; one each in Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, Missouri, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota- but none in Texas.

Most chroniclers of watering traditions operated under the misconception that Texas had few spas. In 1942 medical historian Henry Sigerist noted that Texas was second in the nation in the number of medical springs (Wyoming was first), although he failed to list the number of improved resorts. Geographer James Vance incorrectly drew the boundaries of “Arcadia,” where nineteenth-century healthseekers fled to the western countryside, around parts of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, with no consideration given to their “bucolic search for health” in Texas. Historian Billy Jones, however, documented the immigration of a large number of healthseekers to the Lone State after the Civil War. He noted that Texas almost equaled California and Colorado for its reputation as a healthful location. His work, however, covered tubercular patients, many of whom did not visit Texas after 1900. Many of these omissions can be attributed to the state’s frontier image and to the lack of development in the grand style.

Many Texas resorts exhibited some regional and some national characteristics in their morphology and style. Hot Wells (Bexar County) and Hynson Springs (Harrison County) displayed long verandas and connecting walkways, indicative of national resort design. Generally, spas lacked an integrated plan (wih the exception of Wootan Wells which was a completely planned resort). Resort owners picked what worked for them. Simplicity seemed the key.

Few hotels embodied the Greek Revivalist style, but some included promenades or boardwalks, as did the northern spas. More informal in nature, lovers’ lanes along scenic vistas (particularly Mineral Wells in Palo Pinto County and Lampasas in Lampasas County) expressed the spirit of the more elegant northern equivalents. One aspect of the southern resort style survived in Texas’s early spas where cabins surrounded a hotel- at Sour Lake, for example, or at Lampasas’ Hancock Springs and at Piedmont. Simple sheds or more elaborate pavilions also replaced southern springhouses.

Wealthier folk usually visited a resort in its early years, before the general populace caught on. This “mass follows class” phenomenon held true for most resorts in this country, although many remained the domain of the well-to-do. In Texas, the prosperity of the southern planter contributed to the popularity of a few early-day resorts (notably Piedmont, in Grimes County). Although seasonal migration played less of a role in the social life, some spas higher in elevation (notably Hynson Springs in Marshall) became retreats as summer fevers decimated the populace of lower-lying towns. Generally, both the rich and the poor met at Texas spas, where less-opulent architecture and routines assured greater social interaction. After the Civil War, when more people could affort to travel, Texas’ watering places attracted a wide range of people, from the poorer, who could camp at any spring, to the rich, cattle barons who stayed at hotels, such as the Baker Hotel in Mineral Wells. Often their social activities converged, either through normal intercourse in commerce or the service sectors or, just as likely, through sharing social routines.

Resort-goers in Texas led less elaborate routines, although Mineral Wells’ activities involved aspects reminiscent of southeastern resort life. Many visitors traveled to Texas to pass a season at Mineral Wells, often following an agenda of morning “calling,” afternoon “drives,” and evening “balls.”

Texas’s spa enthusiasts characterized the landscape around many springs as romantic and picturesque. They made daily excursions into the countryside to picnic or ride, emulating Arkansas’s Hot Springs to some extent. Visitors rode burros up Mineral Wells’ mountains as they did at Hot Springs’ Happy Hollow. Similarly, San Antonio’s Hot Wells boasted an alligator farm and an ostrich farm. Mineral Wells also emulated the Arkansas resort in its many bathhouses, which were named after several in that state’s Hot Springs. Mineral Wells’ Baker Hotel dominated the city’s skyline, as did the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs; both, in fact, were designed by the same architect. Also sharing the names of Hot Springs’ landmarks were the Majestic and Arlington Hotels of Mineral Wells, the Bethesda Bathhouse of Marlin, the Park Hotel of Lampasas, and the Lamar Bathhouse in Mineral Wells.

If Texas spas lacked the grand style of the East, the society of the South, and the widespread, natural hot springs of the West, they did not lack the ingenuity and adaptability required to meet the needs of a demanding public. From the frontier years of the Republic to the postwar years of the twentieth century, people flocked to the state’s mineral waters primarily for one reason- health. In that sense, Texas springs were resorts in the truest sense, despite their relative anonymity to the rest of the nation.

The University of Texas Press http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/