The Baker Hotel: Crazy Water and the Texas Riviera

The story of the Baker Hotel begins with a sick man and a surprising well. In the eighteen eighties, a settler named J. A. Lynch dug for water on the rolling Palo Pinto County plains and struck something odd: mineral-rich water that, by his account, cured his rheumatism. Word spread. One well, highly concentrated with lithium, reportedly cleared the confusion of a woman locals called demented, and the water quickly earned the nickname Crazy Water. By the turn of the twentieth century, Mineral Wells had become a destination for the ailing and the hopeful from across the South and Midwest.

Civic leaders, sensing an opportunity, recruited Texas hotelier T. B. Baker to build a facility worthy of the trade. Baker, who had grown up in the hotel business and built properties across Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois, broke ground on a fourteen-story Spanish Colonial Revival tower designed by architect Wyatt C. Hedrick. It opened in November of nineteen twenty-nine, within weeks of Black Tuesday and the collapse of the stock market.

That inauspicious timing did not sink the Baker. Fourteen stories of yellow brick and red tile rose above the Palo Pinto prairie and became, through the nineteen thirties and forties, one of the most glamorous resorts in the American South. Clark Gable came. Judy Garland came. Marlene Dietrich, Lawrence Welk, the Three Stooges, and Bonnie and Clyde all reportedly passed through its four hundred fifty rooms. Two ballrooms, a bowling alley, a gymnasium, and an outdoor swimming pool filled the building. Guests came to drink and bathe in the mineral water, believed to cure everything from arthritis to melancholy.

The resort era ended gradually, killed by highways that moved vacationers past small towns and motels that replaced grand hotels. The Baker closed permanently in nineteen seventy-two. For decades it stood empty on the Mineral Wells skyline, a fourteen-story ruin the town could not quite let go. In recent years restoration work has begun, a story still unfinished.