Montvale Springs

At its peak the Seven Gables had 125 rooms for 300 to 400 guests, the largest hotel in the region, with sixty cottages, some for guests' servants. A stage line from Knoxville ran by 1837, and a 6:30 a.m. coach reached the hotel by noon. Summer board ran $40 a month, and by the late 1850s most guests came from Georgia. Foute had hired Cherokee laborers to build the roads. Confederate general Daniel Smith Donelson died of chronic diarrhea at the resort on April 17, 1863, and the novelist Mary Noailles Murfree visited often.

What the plaque says

Montvale Springs Montvale Springs and Chihowee Mountain, eight miles south of Maryville, were inhabited by Native American for thousands of years. In 1832 Daniel Foute constructed a road from Maryville and built Montvale Springs Hotel, one of Tennessee's first mineral springs resorts. Asa Watson replaced the log hotel in 1853 with the Seven Gables Hotel. Promoted as the fountain of youth, Montvale guests came from around the world. Novelist-post Sidney Lanier (1843-1881) spent summers there. Continued - The Seven Gables Hotel burned in 1896. Andrew Gamble built a third hotel in 1901. Ludwigh Pflanze ran it from 1911 to 1933, when it burned. The YMCA operated the 394-acre Camp Montvale as a summer camp from 1948 to 2005. Sam furrow purchased it 2008 and placed a conservation easement on it with Foothills Land Conservancy to protect conservation values. Harmony Family Center bought it in 2022 to benefit children, families, and community.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cades Cove — 14 mi
  A Smokies valley ringed by mountains, once the Cherokee hunting ground of Tsiyahi and later a farming community of 685 people, kept by the park after its families were bought out.
• Blount Mansion — 15 mi
  The 1792 frame house of William Blount, governor of the Southwest Territory, Knoxville's only National Historic Landmark, where the people he enslaved are named.
• Beck Cultural Exchange Center — 16 mi
  Knoxville's Black history museum and archive, opened in 1975 in the 1912 Dandridge Avenue house the community bought for $22,500.
• Fort Loudoun State Historic Park — 18 mi
  A reconstructed 1756-57 British fort on the Little Tennessee River in Overhill Cherokee country, besieged in 1760 and surrendered on August 9 of that year.

More markers nearby

• William Bennett Scott, Sr. ca. 1821-1885 — steps away
• Where Houston Enlisted — 0.3 mi
• Louis Philippe's Visit — 0.3 mi
• Maryville College — 0.7 mi