Sodaville Mineral Springs Resort

In eighteen forty, a man named Charles Matheny began promoting the springs along this stretch of southern Ohio as medicinal waters, part of a national craze that sent people traveling long distances to soak in and drink mineral spring water as a cure for nearly everything that ailed them. The first hotel went up in eighteen sixty-four, and the resort took the name Sodaville.

Over the next six decades, Sodaville changed hands several times and reached its peak as a popular health destination drawing visitors from across the region. Then in nineteen twenty-four the main hotel burned to the ground. A smaller hotel kept things going until nineteen forty, but the era of the grand mineral-spring resort was ending everywhere, overtaken by modern medicine and the automobile's promise of faster, farther travel. Today only the marker remains to hint at the vanished world of Victorian health tourism that once flourished right here in rural Adams County.