Mineral Wells

The plaque tells how the water was found. The Handbook of Texas tells how a town was built around it. J. A. Lynch laid out Mineral Wells in 1881, and the Crazy Well of 1885 started the boom. The newspaper man J. C. Son wrote up the water in exchange for a town lot. The railroad arrived in 1891, the Hexagon House opened in 1897 as the first of the big resort hotels, and by 1920 the town counted 400 wells and billed itself as the South's greatest health resort. Each June brought the Texas Health Festival.

What the plaque says

Mineral Wells A town built on water. Founded 1877 by J. A. Lynch, a settler who miraculously recovered from rheumatism after drinking the foul-tasting, but apparently healthful, water in this well. As the news spread, hundreds converged to "take" the waters, and a boom town sprang up. Its commercial slogan "crazy" arose from a deputed cure of insanity at the "crazy woman well". Although the water's curative value is likely due to dissolved epsom and glauber salts, amazing powers were attributed to it. For years Mineral Wells was Texas' leading health spa. (1969)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Mineral Wells State Park and Trailway — 4.0 mi
  A Cross Timbers park on the old Camp Wolters grounds, built around a 1922 water-supply lake for a spa town, with Penitentiary Hollow's rock climbing and a 20-mile trailway.
• Chandor Gardens — 18 mi
  A portrait painter's English-and-Chinese garden rooms, blasted and planted from a bare 3.5-acre hillside in Weatherford beginning in 1936, abandoned after 1978 and reopened by the city in 2002.

More markers nearby

• First Baptist Church of Mineral Wells — 0.3 mi
• Famous Mineral Water Company — 0.3 mi
• Dr. H.H. Milling — 0.5 mi
• Old Camp Wolters — 2.2 mi