Hot Springs, North Carolina

Hot Springs, tucked along the French Broad River in Madison County, built its identity around mineral springs that drew wealthy visitors to the two-hundred-room Mountain Park Hotel after eighteen eighty-six. When the United States entered the First World War in nineteen seventeen, the federal government requisitioned the hotel for a different purpose entirely. On June eighth, nineteen seventeen, the first of twenty-three hundred German civilians arrived by train , men pulled from ships seized by Britain in nineteen fourteen and interned as enemy nationals.

The old resort's marble bath pools and croquet lawns became a prison camp enclosed in barbed wire. Homesick internees built a replica Bavarian village out of river driftwood and tin cans. After fourteen months the camp closed, the prisoners were sent to Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, and the hotel was converted into a military hospital.

Some internees returned to visit after the war ended.