Basin Spring and the Rush That Built a Town

The town of Eureka Springs began with a story about a sick boy and a spring of water. A Civil War veteran named Alvah Jackson had found a spring in the Ozark hills of northwest Arkansas and bathed his eyes in it, convinced the mineral water would heal his eye ailment. Word spread, the way word about miraculous things always spread in the nineteenth century, fast and without much scrutiny.

Visitors began making the rough journey to the spring, and some of them said they felt better. In the summer of eighteen seventy-nine, one of those visitors was a doctor named Isaac Newton Purdum, and the account he shared when he returned home lit a fire. Within weeks, people were streaming into the hills on foot and by wagon, building camps and then cabins on the steep wooded slopes above the spring.

By the time anyone thought to count them, thousands had arrived. The town took July fourth, eighteen seventy-nine, as its founding date, because on that Independence Day a large crowd had gathered and decided, informally, that a town would exist here. Within two years, the town had grown past three thousand nine hundred residents by the census of eighteen eighty, and by eighteen eighty-one it was the fourth largest city in Arkansas, an astonishing rise for a hollow in the Ozark Mountains.

Eureka is the Greek word for I have found it, the cry of discovery, and it captured exactly what the founders believed they had done. They had found the water that healed. The railroad arrived in eighteen eighty-three, bringing brick and ambition and a new class of visitor who wanted a hotel rather than a tent.

Bathhouses were built, hotels rose on every available slope, and the Victorian confidence of the era poured itself into the hillside. What was extraordinary about Eureka Springs compared to other mineral spring boom towns is what did not happen afterward. When the scientific medicine of the twentieth century dismissed the mineral cure as wishful thinking and the crowds stopped coming, the buildings did not burn or fall.

They sat in the Ozark hills and waited. The terrain, the same impossible slope that made the town so hard to build, also made it hard to tear down and replace. In nineteen seventy, the entire city was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district.

Today Eureka Springs is one of the best-preserved Victorian-era towns in the United States, a place where the boom years never quite ended because the architecture never had a chance to be replaced.