Red Boiling Springs

Red Boiling Springs grew around water that smells of sulfur and, people once believed, worked like medicine. A salt lick a few miles northwest had drawn animals, hunters and American Indians long before. In the 1830s a farmer named Jesse Jones noticed red-colored water bubbling up on his land, and in 1844 Samuel Hare bought the tract and built an inn. The springs rise through black Chattanooga shale, which gives the water its iron sulfate and its smell. There are five kinds of water, called white, red, black, double and twist, and freestone, and red-painted pumps around town mark the springs.

The resort took off after the Civil War: a stagecoach line from the railroad stop at Gallatin in 1873, a New York investor buying the springs in the 1880s, and automobile taxis replacing the stagecoaches by the 1910s. In 1918 four hotels stood in the valley, a decade later eight, and eventually more than a dozen, plus as many boarding houses, most two stories with long verandas. Guests rode horses, bowled, danced and drank the waters, each of which was said to cure something different.

Not all of that world is left. The Donoho Hotel, rebuilt in 1916 and long the town's best known, burned to the ground on November 11, 2025. The 1927 brick Cloyd Hotel, now the Thomas House, is among the old hotels on the National Register, and the pumps are still there.