Rural Life and Culture in the Upper Cumberland

10. Good Times

178 JEANETTE KEITH 178 Chapter 10 GOOD TIMES Vacationing at Red Boiling Springs JEANETTE KEITH Summer resorts were long patronized by southerners, who annually fled the heat of the cities for the relatively cooler air of mountain communities . During the late nineteenth century, resorts were so popular that the Nashville Daily American ran a special weekly column, “Amid Cool Breezes,” which kept everyone up to date on “What Nashville Summer Wanderers Are Doing.” There were columns from Tennessee resorts at Beersheba Springs, Lookout Mountain, Estill Springs, Tyree Springs, and such distant out-of-state spas as Manitou, Colorado.1 The Daily American’s special correspondent recorded the names of those vacationing at Red Boiling Springs and described amusements found there. The newspapers kept the country informed of the doings of Vanderbilts at Newport—who attended what party, what entertainment was offered, and so on; the middle-class vacationers at Red Boiling Springs, faithful mimics, could enjoy knowing that the details of their vacations would appear in the Nashville Daily American, just like Mrs. Astor’s. By 1900, the Nashville American was running more Tennessee resort ads than it had in the early 1890s. There were ads for the springs at Tyree, Epson, Kingston, Fernvale, Nicholson, Capon, Estill, Easterbook, Beersheba Springs, and Castalian Springs, as well as ads for the “Lake Country” of Illinois, Michigan, and Minnesota. At the bottom of the page was an ad for Red Boiling Springs: “The Old Reliable.” It mentioned the values of the waters and noted, “Hacks meet trains.”2 At Red Boiling Springs in Macon County, about ninety miles northeast of Nashville, improvements in transportation, plus a prosperous Good Times 179 national and regional economy in the 1920s, led to a boom in the resort business that lasted through the Depression. The town had approximately 800 residents in the winter; summer visitors could number in the thousands. Ironically, the end of the boom was caused primarily by improvements in transportation. Taking the waters had long been seen as a therapeutic and sociable endeavor. European nobility had made annual pilgrimages to the great Continental spas, and White Sulphur Springs of Virginia had attracted the plantation elite of the antebellum South.3 Red Boiling Springs’ guests, by contrast, were mostly middle or upper-middle class: storekeepers, doctors, and lawyers from the small towns of middle Tennessee and southern Kentucky, or from Nashville, Louisville, and Chattanooga.They were the sort of people whose comings and goings were chronicled in the society pages of small-town newspapers. They could afford to take extended vacations or to send their wives and children off for two weeks or two months at Red Boiling Springs, while they visited on weekends. Red Boiling Springs offered them a change of scenery without any jarring change in lifestyle. There was nothing exotic about vacationing at Red Boiling Springs. The food and accommodations would not differ significantly from what they were used to at home. A hotel guest from Louisville might have found bathing with a pitcher and a basin in his room a nostalgic experience. Red Boiling Springs historical marker, Macon County, Tennessee. Photo by the editors. 180 JEANETTE KEITH In addition to mineral waters and a restful atmosphere, Red Boiling Springs offered many varied forms of recreation: bridge, bowling, boating , horseback riding, swimming, and tennis. There were dances every night. Illicit pleasures such as moonshine liquor and high-stakes gambling also were available. Though Red Boiling Springs billed itself as “The South’s Greatest Health Resort,” and people did indeed come to the town to improve their health by drinking sulfur water, they also came to be amused. By the mid-1930s, the town had become an amusement center for the rural counties surrounding it, and hotel guests were joined on the crowded streets by local teenagers out for a lively Saturday night. People had been coming to Red Boiling Springs since the 1840s, when a “red sulfur” spring bubbled up on Jessie Jones’s farm. According to legend, the spring cured a local man’s eye disease, and people began drinking the water or bathing in it for various ailments. In 1844 Jones sold the spring and twenty acres of land to Samuel E. Hare. With a partner, Hare put up a “house of entertainment” or inn in 1849 and initiated the resort industry in Red Boiling Springs.4 The resort remained small during the nineteenth century, probably because of...