Blount Springs, the Saratoga of the South

This wooded valley was once one of the most fashionable resorts in the South. People had prized the sulfur springs here for generations. Legend even holds that Davy Crockett recovered from a fever beside these waters around eighteen fifteen.

Through the eighteen hundreds, wealthy southerners poured in from Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana to take the mineral waters. In eighteen eighty-seven the iron magnates James and Mack Sloss bought the property and renamed its hotel the Blount Springs Hotel, one of the finest in the Southeast. Socialites like the actress Lillian Russell and the millionaire Diamond Jim Brady mingled here at what people called the Saratoga of the South. Each spring offered a different mineral, white sulfur, red sulfur, even lithium, and the water was bottled in blue glass and sold. The railroad rerouted its line away from the town in nineteen fourteen, the hotel burned in nineteen fifteen, and the grand resort vanished.