Dear America,

As a kid, I dreamed of sparkling water fountains. I wanted unlimited seltzer by the playground and soda water on street corners. Ponce de León sailed the seas in search of the fountain of youth. Me? I have searched for a fountain of bubbles. To this day, I haven’t found one. But as for the Fountain of Youth, I can now say with confidence that Ponce went looking in the wrong place. He should have gone to Arkansas.

As it happens, one of his compatriots did go to Arkansas, looking for El Dorado, the City of Gold. What Fernando de Soto found, ironically, was as close as we’ve got to the Fountain of Youth, in a place known to the native Quapaw Indians as the “Valley of the Vapors.” De Soto was the first European to visit the hot springs of Arkansas.

Tucked away in the Ouachita Mountains (that’s pronounced WAH-sha-TAW, by the way) on the Ouachita River, sits the town of Hot Springs. In the hills that rise to the east of downtown, forty-seven springs bring a million gallons of mineral water out of the earth every day, at a piping 143 degrees. The water, with a pleasant taste and absence of sulfur, is piped into bathhouses and hotels, and into public fountains both hot and cold. The water is extremely pure, and the National Park Service advises anyone to “Quaff the Elixir.”

A few miles north, another spring feeds the Mountain Valley Spring Water bottling plant. They started bottling the water in Hot Springs in 1871 and haven’t stopped since. Today it’s sold all over the country in green bottles, still and sparkling. While the city of Hot Springs still hasn’t figured out how to provide a public sparkling water fountain, what they’ve got is… pretty good.

The US Geological Survey estimates that the water now bubbling up from the springs fell as rain 4400 years ago. The Indians in the area knew of the springs for many years. De Soto had been there in the 16th century. The first Americans to document the springs were Dunbar and Jackson, of the Dunbar & Jackson Expedition commissioned by President Jefferson to explore the new Louisiana Territory. Dunbar and Jackson would later tell Jefferson about “the boiling springs” they had found.

In 1806, President Jefferson reported to Congress the results of the Dunbar & Jackson Expedition and its more famous contemporaries Lewis & Clark. On December 7, 1804, having traveled up the Ouachita River, the men “…tasted the waters of the hot springs, that is, after a few minutes cooling, for it was impossible to approach it with the lips when first taken up, without scalding; the taste does not differ from that of good water rendered hot by culinary fire.”

Personally, I think “Boiling Springs” has a nice rhythm to it. But alas: the city was incorporated as Hot Springs, Arkansas in 1851.

For a city of its size, Hot Springs has an amazing number of firsts, and a rich history that at times feels like ad libbing.

It can lay claim to being America’s first resort town. The land that is now Hot Springs National Park was the first land in the US to be set aside by Congress as a preserve (in 1832). The abandoned Army-Navy Hospital, which towers over Hot Springs, was the first general hospital in the US built to serve Army and Navy patients. In all of this, the springs are essential. People believed in their healing power, and Hot Springs became a refuge. 

It was the first place to host what we now call “Spring Training” for Major League Baseball, when Albert Spalding of the “Chicago White Stockings” (yes, that Spalding) took his team to Hot Springs in 1886 to prepare for the upcoming season. In a generation, scores of teams followed. 

During spring training on St. Patrick’s Day in 1918, Babe Ruth hit the first home run in the history of baseball to exceed 500 feet (573 is the recorded number), and the ball landed in America’s first commercial alligator farm, which had been established across the street. How’s that for firsts?

Ruth later bought a baby alligator from the farm; I am told that the alligators are no longer for sale, but for $12 you can feed them, and kids go free!

Before the days of flying to Miami Beach, Americans took sleeper trains to Hot Springs to partake in the magic water. And it was not just baseball teams. Presidents and gangsters went, too! Teddy Roosevelt visited in 1910; Al Capone and Lucky Luciano were frequent guests in town in the 1920s. Across the street from the glorious Buckstaff Baths (one of a few still in operation, with its dramatic blue awnings and stone columns), the Gangster Museum of America tells this story of speakeasies, illegal gambling, and an uneasy truce among criminals who agreed to keep their violence out of town. 

Walking up and down Bathhouse Row is a tour of amazing architecture. The Quapaw Baths, with its arches and tiled domes, could make you think you’re in an American Budapest! The Superior Bathhouse, with its beautiful brick façade, has been turned into a craft brewery, and the windows painted green (on the original bathhouse, they were white). It is, allegedly, the only brewery in the world to use thermal spring water.

It’s a portal to Gilded Age America, as well as the Roaring 20s. The stately Arlington Hotel, at the end of Bathhouse Row, still stands as a relic of that era, welcoming guests as it did when Babe Ruth and Al Capone roamed its halls.

Past the hotel, Mountain Valley maintains a boutique, selling its water, crocks for dispensing water, and plenty of other merchandise (on my own return to Texas, I received multiple comments in public about my Mountain Valley tee shirt). Across the street, the Colonial Pancake and Waffle House serves up breakfast; I highly recommend.

My visit to Hot Springs was, basically, an accident. I was driving from Texas to Iowa over the course of a few days. On the first day, having made it to Texarkana in late afternoon, I still hadn’t decided where to stop and stay that night. I thought maybe I’d make it to Little Rock. But after iced tea in Hope, I decided to follow signs for Hot Springs. I knew there was a National Park there, but that was about it. What I didn’t expect was… everything else! 

You can be sure that I’ll be back – back to enjoy the magic water of Hot Springs as so many Americans have for hundreds of years. It’s freely available, on the street, in fountains hot and cold (still, not sparkling)! But to console myself in the meantime, I’ll settle for buying plenty of Mountain Valley Water at Whole Foods. To hell with Perrier!

Love,

Maxwell

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