Civil War Healing

Eureka Springs' healing reputation has a wartime chapter that rests on local tradition. Dr. Alvah Jackson is said to have found the springs in 1856, and local writers say he ran "Dr. Jackson's Cave Hospital" during the war, treating wounded soldiers with the water. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says those accounts are not firmly documented. After the war he sold the water as Dr. Jackson's Eye Water. The better-recorded turn came in spring 1879, when Judge Levi Best Saunders of Berryville, invited by Jackson, tried the water for a skin disease. He stayed, and about twenty families followed.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Eureka Springs Historic District — steps away
  An 1879 Ozark spring town on a bluff, with 230 streets and none at right angles, Basin Spring Park, the 1886 Crescent Hotel and a National Register district since 1970.
• Thorncrown Chapel — 2.2 mi
  E. Fay Jones's 1980 glass-and-timber chapel in the Eureka Springs woods, 48 feet high with 425 windows, ranked by the AIA among the best American buildings of its century.
• Hobbs State Park-Conservation Area — 14 mi
  Arkansas's largest state park, about 12,000 acres on Beaver Lake, with the Van Winkle mill site, a graveyard of enslaved people, 54 miles of trail and regulated hunting.
• Roaring River State Park — 14 mi
  A deep valley cut into the edge of the Ozark Plateau south of Cassville, with a fern-hung spring, a trout hatchery on an 1865 mill dam, and land bought with a patent-medicine fortune.

More markers nearby

• Berryville in the Civil War — 9.8 mi
• Van Winkle's Mill — 14 mi
• Skirmish at Yocum Creek — 18 mi
• Butterfield Overland Mail in Missouri - 1858-1861 — 20 mi