Kingston Springs: Sulfur Water and Healing Claims

Long before this town existed, the sulfur springs along the Harpeth River drew people in search of cures. Indigenous communities settled near these waters twelve thousand years ago. The springs that gave the town its name were white, black, and red sulfur flows, each credited by nineteenth-century visitors with its own healing properties.

The first known white settler, Lewis Dunn, received a land grant here in eighteen oh seven as a reward for Revolutionary War service. By eighteen nineteen, a hotel and tavern had been built beside the springs, turning the site into a resort destination for Nashvillians making the short journey west.

The Kingston Springs Hotel, built in eighteen forty nine, was rebuilt in the eighteen nineties after fire destroyed the original structure, and the springs continued drawing visitors well into the twentieth century. The town was formally incorporated in nineteen sixty-five with fewer than three hundred residents. Today it sits just twenty-five miles west of Nashville along the Harpeth River, a quiet community in Cheatham County with a therapeutic past.