Chester Springs: The Army's Only Purpose-Built Hospital

The yellow-tinted water that bubbles up here has been drawing visitors since at least seventeen twenty-two. Lenape people recognized its mineral-rich springs long before European settlers arrived, and by seventeen fifty, Yellow Springs, as it was then known, had become a colonial resort where hundreds of bathers came on a single summer day.

In seventeen seventy-seven, war arrived. After the Battle of Brandywine in September, General Washington established his headquarters at Yellow Springs, and the site became the only military hospital commissioned and built by the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War. Dr. Bodo Otto, a senior surgeon of the Continental Army, oversaw the facility through the Valley Forge winter, treating Washington's soldiers while an herb garden behind the main hall supplied medicine for the entire Continental Army.

After the war the spa reopened, ran fashionably through the early eighteen hundreds, briefly served as a Civil War hospital, and eventually became a fine arts center. In the twentieth century the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts took it over for its summer program. The springs that made it a resort also made it a hospital, and both chapters survive in Chester Springs today.