Marker Text: "Health & social resort during the nineteenth century; patronized by low-country planters. Springs are 600 yds. S." Sulphur Springs, which became a tourist attraction in the mid-nineteenth century, was discovered by Robert Henry and his slave in February 1827. Three years later, his son-in-law, Rueben Deaver, built a wooden hotel on the hill above the springs and began taking summer boarders. Patronage increased exponentially each year, and several additions were made to the hotel. By the 1840s, nearly 500 visitors were arriving each summer
The majority of the visitors were low-country planters, including families such as the Pinckneys, Butlers, Pickens, Alstons, and Kerrisons. The Alstons reserved the corner rooms of the second floor from May to September every season. Besides the L-shaped hotel, Deaver also built several cabins, bowling pin alleys, billiard tables, and shuffleboards.
In addition, the hotel had a large ballroom complete with a string band comprised of free African Americans. One of them, named Randall, had received $5,000 from the state of South Carolina for revealing a contemplated slave insurrection in Charleston. Laptitude, another black musician, was well educated, and owned a plantation near Charleston as well as forty slaves.
In 1862, the hotel burned to the ground. The site was abandoned during the Civil War and Reconstruction, but in 1887 was rebuilt from brick by E. G. Carrier and named first Carrier Springs and then The Belmont under the direction of Dr. Karl Von Ruck of Ohio. From 1889 to 1894 a small electric railroad ferried in tourists from Asheville to the site. However, in September 1891, fire gutted the main hotel building. The site was entirely abandoned in 1894.
References:
John P. Arthur, Western North Carolina: A History (1914)
F. A. Sondley, History of Buncombe County (1930)
Thomas H. Lindsey, Lindsey’s Guide Book to Western North Carolina (1890)
Gail Tennent, The Indian Path in Buncombe County (n.d.)
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Related Themes: C.S.A., Confederate States of America, Confederacy
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