Eureka Springs: The Victorian Healing Town That Never Left the Nineteenth Century

Eureka Springs incorporated in eighteen eighty, in the first season of its existence as a town, on a hillside in Carroll County in the Arkansas Ozarks where mineral springs had been drawing visitors for only a year. The springs were said to cure eye ailments, skin diseases, and the general disorder that the era called rheumatism. A railroad arrived in eighteen eighty-three. By the end of the decade, Eureka Springs was one of the largest cities in Arkansas.

The town's streets were laid out not on a grid but on the contours of the hillside, following ridgelines and hollows in a pattern that makes navigating Eureka Springs on foot a slightly bewildering experience even today. The Victorian architecture that went up in the boom years, the Queen Anne cottages, the ornate hotel facades, the carved-stone commercial buildings, survived almost intact because the economic boom that built them was followed almost immediately by a bust. The mineral-spring health-tourism market collapsed in the early twentieth century as medicine advanced and the idea that spring water cured syphilis became untenable. There was no subsequent economic wave to bulldoze the Victorian streetscape and replace it with something more modern.

What remained was a coherent nineteenth-century town, untouched by the demolition wave that flattened most American downtowns in the nineteen fifties and sixties. Eureka Springs remade itself, eventually, as an arts and tourism destination, drawing visitors to the same architecture that had survived by accident. The springs are still there. The water still flows. Whether it cures anything remains, as it always was, a matter of faith.