![]() Now, visitors come for a single spa experience, on a weekend trip, or for the horse races at Oaklawn.Īfter a century, Hot Springs is still growing and adapting. “People would still come to bathe, but they’d stay to play and gamble, and we became a vacation instead of a medical journey.” Hill calculates that in 1921, about 10,000 people per month would have arrived by rail alone for their bathing treatments. “Over time, Hot Springs began to evolve,” Hill says. Only one of the original locations survived in continuous operation-the Buckstaff, which has now been open since 1912. The most opulent and expensive, the Fordyce, shut its doors in 1962, the Maurice closed in 1974, and the Lamar followed in 1985. The flow of visitors slowed to a trickle, and one by one, the bathhouses closed down. With World War II came the rise of modern medicine, and the bathing industry began to decline. The men are in vapor cabinets and on pack tables, with their bath attendants next to them. “In the 1800s, they were bathing regularly here, which didn’t always happen at home, drinking clean water, which didn’t always happen at home, and relaxing and trying to get better, which probably couldn’t happen at home.”Ī colorized photo of the men’s bathing department in the Buckstaff Bathhouse in the 1920s. Hill points out that therapeutic bathing likely didn’t cure people outright, but it certainly helped to some degree. “The idea behind the bathing itself was that you were to elevate your body temperature to make you sweat out impurities.” For a full regimen, a patient would stay for three weeks, drinking the mineral-rich thermal waters, bathing and doing physical therapy by morning and then exercising and socializing by afternoon. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he explains, therapeutic bathing was actually at a doctor’s prescription. “But in reality, when it all started, it was people’s last resort.” “Hot Springs has long had the slogan, ‘America’s First Resort,’” Hill says. By the time the area became a National Park in 1921 (it was already protected as a preserve that President Andrew Jackson set aside in 1832), the first bathhouses, all wooden, were already open, along with places for the bathers to stay and eat. Today, visitors can still wander along Bathhouse Row, eight historic bathhouses that make up the heart of the town that sprang up around the thermal waters in the early 1800s. ![]() A stereographic image from the 1870s of three men with their feet in the thermal waters of Corn Hole Spring. ![]()
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