Dawson Springs: Healing Waters and a Night of Destruction

In the late eighteen hundreds, a well dug on a Hopkins County farm reportedly struck a vein of iron-rich mineral water, and word spread that it cured ailments. Word spread fast. By the early nineteen hundreds Dawson Springs had become the most fashionable health resort in western Kentucky, drawing over fifty thousand visitors in nineteen oh one alone, and a grand hotel.

The boom faded with the Depression, and on December tenth, twenty twenty-one, an EF-Four tornado tore through the town of about twenty-five hundred people, killing nineteen residents and leveling hundreds of homes. Dawson Springs has been rebuilding ever since, carrying both a golden past and a scarred recent memory.