From the Archives: Hot Springs Hotel
Part 3
By Jonathan Williams
In 1889, a Charleston newspaper editor gushed about the facilities the syndicate had constructed on the site:
So much can be said of the Mountain Park Hotel… that it is somewhat difficult to know where to begin and where to end. In the first place, the position of the hotel is unsurpassed… The hotel is certainly worthy of the spot. It forms, at present, three sides of a square, the lawn tennis ground ranging on the eastern side. Along the whole length of the hotel are broad piazzas, on which a sufficient constitutional walk can be taken, if bad weather chance to come. How invigorating it is to sit there and drink in the brisk and exhilarating mountain air. In the front of the hotel, on the ground floor, are the dining room, the reception room, the office, three reading and sitting rooms and a spacious parlor for ladies. In the north wing there is another parlor for ladies, and there, too, is the vast ball-room, which is so arranged as to serve, with its spacious stage, for tableaux and amateur theatricals. The bedrooms are on the upper stories, the hotel accommodating three or four hundred persons. It is handsomely furnished throughout, and every room is well lighted with gas. …No hotel in New York furnishes forth its tables more handsomely. There is rich variety; no sameness. Each dish has its own savour.[1]
Now that the resort was linked with a nation-spanning railroad network, it had the potential to turn a profit like never before, but the Southern Improvement Company, having overtaxed its resources, was forced to sell off its investment before it could reap the benefits. The hotel returned to the Rumboughs, who rose to such Gilded Age heights that James Rumbough’s daughter, Bessie, married the son of former president Andrew Johnson and was later formally presented to Queen Victoria while traveling in Europe.[2]
Around the time James H. Rumbough passed the property to his son James E. Rumbough, however, the hotel’s fortunes had begun to ebb for good. Three strokes of misfortune cemented the decline. The first was the French Broad flood of 1916, which the hotel weathered, but not without loss. Then came the entry of the United States into the First World War in 1917, which brought business to a near-total halt, but also allowed Rumbough to lease the property to the federal government as an internment camp for Central Powers nationals. But when yet another fire leveled the Mountain Park Hotel in 1920, Hot Springs’s days as a nationally known health resort ended for good.
The town carried on. Another hotel, far more modest than its predecessor, rose on the site; it burned in turn in the 1970s and was replaced. The town’s tourism industry today is also linked with the Appalachian Trail, which makes its way down from the mountains to cross the French Broad right next to the resort. For more on the town, see its website here.
[1] Dawson, F. W., “A Delightful Summer Resort in Western North Carolina,” Asheville Weekly Citizen, July 25, 1889, 6.
[2] Hurley, 2. Bessie’s husband, Andrew Johnson, Jr., was “sickly,” and died shortly after they married, at age 26. This event probably did not itself contribute to the declining popularity of health resort, but may at least illustrate the causes of that decline.
