Appalachian Community Histories – Austin Springs, Washington County: The Lost Mineral Resort on the Watauga River
Austin Springs survives as a small community near Johnson City, where Washington County approaches the Sullivan and Carter county lines. Roads, homes, cemeteries, and the altered shoreline of the Watauga River now occupy a landscape that once welcomed summer travelers from across the South. During the nineteenth century, Austin Springs was not merely a rural neighborhood. It was a mineral-water resort advertised in distant newspapers as a place of health, recreation, and mountain hospitality.
This history concerns Austin Springs in northeastern Washington County, not the separate Tennessee community bearing the same name in Weakley County. Contemporary evidence shows that the Washington County resort was operating by at least 1873, offering accommodations, mineral water, fishing, boating, hunting, transportation, and other amusements beside the Watauga River.
A Watering Place Beside the Watauga
One of the earliest detailed advertisements for Austin Springs appeared in the Talbotton Standard of Georgia on July 30, 1873. It placed the resort approximately four and one-half miles from Johnson City on the Watauga River and described its setting as “one of the most romantic of all the watering places.” A grove covered the bluff above the river, giving guests views across the water toward the valleys and mountains of northeastern Tennessee.
The advertisement promoted the spring water as chalybeate, meaning that it contained iron compounds. Such water was commonly marketed during the nineteenth century as a tonic for people suffering from weakness, digestive complaints, fatigue, and other illnesses. Although many of the medical promises associated with mineral springs were never scientifically proven, the belief in restorative waters helped create a large resort industry across Tennessee and the Appalachian South. Many of the state’s earliest vacation destinations developed around springs whose waters were advertised according to their color, mineral content, taste, or supposed medicinal effect.
Austin Springs entered that world at a fortunate moment. Railroads were making East Tennessee easier to reach, while families from the hotter regions of Georgia, Alabama, Texas, and the lower South were searching for cooler places to spend part of the summer. A traveler could leave a Southern city by rail, arrive near Johnson City or Carter’s Depot, and complete the journey to the springs by horse-drawn hack.
The Austin Family and the Resort Business
Later community histories associate the property with Clisby or Clisbe Austin, a Methodist minister who reportedly purchased land there around 1860. That date remains a local tradition rather than a fully established fact because the original Washington County deeds have not yet been examined closely enough to confirm the purchase, its boundaries, or the condition of the property at the time.
What the contemporary record does establish is that F. H. Austin and his brother were operating the resort by 1873. Their enterprise appears to have connected Austin Springs with the Austin House in Johnson City. The 1873 advertisement offered daily transportation between the Johnson City hotel and the riverside spring, allowing visitors to divide their time between the growing railroad town and the quieter country resort. Board was advertised at $1.50 per day, $9 per week, or $30 per month, with special arrangements available for families.
The Austin family also participated in the broader nineteenth-century market for patent medicines. Advertisements for Austin’s Liver Regulator appeared in regional newspapers during the 1870s, while Clisbe Austin received a United States patent in 1874 for a medicinal compound. These records do not prove that the medicine was produced at the resort itself, but they show that the Austin name was being connected with health products at the same time that the family was promoting its mineral water. The resort, the medicine advertisements, and the language of healing all belonged to the same commercial culture.
Visitors Arrive from the South
Austin Springs was advertised well beyond Washington County. Notices appeared in Georgia and Texas newspapers, demonstrating that the Austins were seeking guests from regions connected to East Tennessee by the expanding railroad network.
The Thomasville Times of Georgia recommended Austin’s Springs in July 1874 after receiving favorable reports from visitors who associated the resort with health, pleasure, and enjoyment. A longer travel account published that September described the journey from Johnson City toward Austin’s Springs and presented the resort as part of a wider tour through the East Tennessee mountains. Unlike a standard advertisement purchased by the proprietors, the account recorded the experience of reaching and visiting the place.
In 1877, an advertisement in the Galveston Daily News described the water more elaborately as coming from aluminous, sulphated, chalybeate springs. It located the resort on the Watauga River, a few miles west of Carter’s Depot, and again emphasized accommodations, food, fishing, mineral water, and reasonable boarding rates. The appearance of such an advertisement in Texas suggests that Austin Springs was not depending solely upon local visitors. Its proprietors were attempting to attract travelers across a broad Southern market.
Austin Springs in the Railroad Guide
The fullest surviving contemporary description appeared in the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railroad Company’s 1880 Guide to the Summer Resorts and Watering Places of East Tennessee. Railroad companies published such guides to encourage passenger travel, filling their pages with mountain scenery, hotels, springs, fishing streams, and communities located along or near their lines.
The guide’s illustration of Austin Springs shows a large, two-story frame building with broad porches and an upper gallery. Small figures stand around the entrance and grounds, suggesting the social life that the proprietors hoped potential guests would imagine. It was a substantial rural hotel rather than a lone springhouse hidden in the woods.
F. H. Austin and his brother promised first-class accommodations and declared that they intended to build the reputation of the resort by providing excellent food and household comforts. Their advertisement also presented Austin Springs as a morally respectable destination. The proprietors stated that no whiskey saloon would be allowed on the premises, an assurance intended to appeal to religious families and visitors who associated some resorts with drinking, gambling, and disorder.
Guests were offered a bowling alley, croquet grounds, boats for rowing and fishing, saddle horses, and other amusements. The river contained black and rock bass, while hunters were promised an abundance of small game. The resort therefore appealed to more than invalids seeking medicinal water. Families, anglers, hunters, and travelers looking for a long summer retreat could all find reasons to visit.
The advertised rates were $25 for one month or $55 for three months. Those extended rates reveal how mineral resorts operated. Austin Springs was not promoted simply as a place for an overnight stay. Guests might remain for weeks or even an entire summer, forming a temporary community around meals, games, fishing trips, evening conversations, and repeated visits to the spring.
Mail, Telegraphs, and the Daily Hack
Austin Springs may have stood in the countryside, but it was connected to the transportation and communication systems of the period. By 1880, the resort had its own post office with daily summer mail. A telegraph office operated at Carter’s Depot, where a daily hack carried passengers between the railroad and the springs.
The Tennessee State Library and Archives records that the Austin’s Springs post office opened in 1875 and remained in operation until 1900. Postal records identify Clisbe Austin Jr. among its early postmasters, while George F. Gammon received an appointment in August 1897. When the office closed in December 1900, its mail service was transferred to Johnson City.
The post office outlasted the resort’s earliest advertising campaigns and became an institution for the surrounding rural community. The federal List of Pensioners on the Roll for 1883 gave Austin’s Springs as the postal address of at least one Washington County pensioner. This suggests that the office served farmers, veterans, laborers, and families living around the springs, not merely summer hotel guests.
Postal directories and county maps continued to recognize Austin’s Springs during the 1890s. The place had acquired a permanent identity. Even as the fortunes of the hotel changed, the resort’s name remained attached to the broader settlement along the Watauga.
A Community Beyond the Hotel
Court records preserved by the Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives provide glimpses of Austin Springs that resort advertisements did not show. The advertisements offered carefully arranged scenes of comfort, recreation, and hospitality. The court indexes reveal property disputes, debt proceedings, tax problems, and religious gatherings.
An 1875 case involved James Barker and F. H. Austin and Brothers. Later chancery proceedings joined claims involving Austin and Company with the Greeneville Tobacco Warehouse Company, describing the disputes as debt cases. In 1887, the State of Tennessee pursued F. H. Austin and Brothers in a tax-debt proceeding. Another case from 1889 through 1891 concerned an Austin Springs property dispute involving Leroy Dyer, J. R. Clark, W. J. Collins, and others.
These cases may eventually answer important questions about the resort’s ownership, finances, and decline. The surviving files can contain deeds, depositions, surveys, receipts, business agreements, and testimony unavailable anywhere else. Until the original papers are examined, however, the case titles establish only that the Austin business faced legal and financial disputes.
Another Circuit Court case charged Bruce Hudson or Hutson and Rhea Hodge with disturbing public worship at Austin Springs during 1887 or 1888. The index does not explain exactly what happened, but it confirms that organized religious activity was taking place in the community. The resort’s owners had advertised a morally controlled environment, while the surrounding settlement was developing its own churches, meetings, and local institutions.
The Austin Springs Fair
By the late 1890s, Austin Springs was also serving as a public gathering place. The Johnson City Comet reported on a three-day fair held there beginning July 28, 1897. Later coverage discussed premiums awarded during the event, including a prize connected with a fox race.
The fair would have brought together livestock owners, farmers, merchants, musicians, competitors, families, and spectators from the surrounding countryside. A contemporary report quoted in a documentary history of the Johnson City and Carnegie Street Railway argued that the three-day gathering proved the region was ready to support such an enterprise.
The fair represents an important change in the meaning of Austin Springs. The place was no longer functioning only as a private resort marketed to distant travelers. It had become a community venue where Washington County residents gathered for competition, trade, entertainment, and social life.
From Resort Grounds to Racetrack
The Austin’s Springs post office closed in 1900, but the community did not disappear. Roads, schools, churches, farms, mills, and family properties continued to carry the name into the twentieth century.
Local histories report that Austin Springs School opened around 1900 and remained in operation until 1971. Those dates still need to be confirmed through Washington County Board of Education minutes, teacher contracts, attendance registers, school census records, deeds, and photographs. The long period associated with the school nevertheless reflects how the community’s identity survived after the mineral-resort era.
Published racing history identifies Austin Springs Park as a half-mile dirt oval located off Austin Springs Road. During the 1930s, drivers reportedly raced Model A and Model T automobiles around the track, sometimes struggling through mud while families watched from the surrounding grounds. The old resort area again became a recreational destination, although roaring engines had replaced the quieter bowling, croquet, boating, and saddle horses advertised half a century earlier.
The racing story should be expanded through contemporary newspaper advertisements, results, racing programs, aerial photographs, and property records. Even so, it demonstrates the continued importance of the Austin Springs grounds as a place where people gathered for entertainment.
The Academy, the Fire, and the Limits of Local Memory
Local accounts state that Castle Heights Military Academy leased the old hotel property around 1929 and briefly operated an Austin Springs branch. According to the same tradition, the branch closed after a cadet drowned, and the former hotel burned around 1935. These stories have been repeated often enough to become part of the community’s accepted history.
They should still be presented cautiously. The academy story requires confirmation through Castle Heights catalogs, enrollment records, Washington County deeds or leases, and Johnson City newspapers from approximately 1928 through 1933. The reported drowning should be supported by a death certificate, newspaper account, academy record, or coroner’s file. Likewise, the date and circumstances of the hotel fire need contemporary documentation.
Recognizing these gaps does not dismiss local memory. Instead, it identifies where future research can strengthen the story. Oral traditions often preserve the outline of an event even when names, dates, and circumstances change across generations.
Austin Springs in Photographs and the Census
A surviving photograph from the James Agee Film Project depicts Lester and Charlie Bowman at Austin Springs in 1934. The image is important because it places named residents within the community during the same decade associated with the academy, racetrack, and disappearance of the old hotel. It offers a human connection to a place otherwise described mostly through advertisements, court indexes, maps, and local recollections.
The 1940 federal census identified Enumeration District 90-32 as Washington County Civil District 10, Austin Springs. The corresponding population schedules can reveal the names, occupations, household relationships, property status, and neighboring families that formed the community after the resort era. Austin Springs had become more than the name of a vanished attraction. It described an established rural district whose residents worked, worshiped, attended school, maintained farms, and traveled into Johnson City.
Boone Reservoir Changes the Landscape
Another major transformation came with the Tennessee Valley Authority’s construction of Boone Dam. Work began in 1950 and was completed in 1952, creating Boone Reservoir along the South Fork Holston and Watauga river system. The project supplied hydroelectric power and flood storage while changing shorelines, roads, property boundaries, and traditional access to the rivers.
TVA property maps, aerial photographs, appraisal files, and land-acquisition records are therefore essential for understanding Austin Springs. A 1959 Boone Reservoir property sheet preserved by the Archives of Appalachia can help researchers compare the older resort landscape with the shoreline that emerged after impoundment.
The river that had drawn fishermen, boaters, and hotel guests during the 1870s remained central to the community, but its appearance and use had changed. Modern USGS records for Knob Creek at Austin Springs continue to document the area’s waterways, linking the historic community to an official geographic and environmental record.
Remembering Austin Springs
A newspaper reported in 1914 that the Bonnie Kate Chapter had placed a Daniel Boone trail marker at Austin Springs. The marker demonstrates that residents were already treating the community as a historical landscape in the early twentieth century. It does not, by itself, prove the exact route traveled by Boone, but it reveals how local people connected Austin Springs to the larger frontier history of northeastern Tennessee.
Cemeteries, family properties, old road alignments, school records, photographs, maps, and the Austin Springs name preserve other parts of the community’s past. Union Cemetery near Austin Springs contains generations of residents whose lives extended far beyond the brief flowering of the mineral resort.
The hotel is gone, and the spring no longer draws summer guests from Georgia and Texas. Yet Austin Springs remains an important example of how Appalachian tourism developed before automobiles and modern highways. Its success depended upon mineral-water beliefs, railroad promotion, river scenery, long summer stays, family hospitality, and carefully maintained connections to depots, mail routes, and telegraph offices.
Austin Springs also shows how a resort could give its name to a lasting community. The hotel faded, but the settlement continued through its post office, churches, fairs, school, racetrack, farms, cemeteries, and family networks. Beneath the modern roads and altered shoreline lies the story of a Washington County watering place where visitors once stepped from a daily hack, drank iron-rich water, fished for bass in the Watauga, and spent their evenings playing croquet beneath the trees.
Sources & Further Reading
East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railroad Company. Guide to the Summer Resorts and Watering Places of East Tennessee. Memphis: S. C. Toof and Company, 1880. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/Guide_to_the_summer_resorts_and_watering_places_of_East_Tennessee_%28IA_guidetosummerres00east%29.pdf
“Austin Springs.” Talbotton Standard (Talbotton, GA), July 30, 1873, 3. https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn85034176/1873-07-30/ed-1/seq-3/
“Austin’s Springs.” Thomasville Times (Thomasville, GA), July 25, 1874, 3. https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn85034183/1874-07-25/ed-1/seq-3/
“Austin’s Springs.” Thomasville Times (Thomasville, GA), September 19, 1874, 2. https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn85034183/1874-09-19/ed-1/seq-2/
“Austin’s Famous Chalybeate Springs.” Thomasville Times (Thomasville, GA), June 6, 1874, 3. https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn85034183/1874-06-06/ed-1/seq-3/
“Austin’s Aluminous Sulphated Chalybeate Springs.” Galveston Daily News, June 27, 1877, 4. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth462285/m1/4/
Austin, Clisbe. “Improvement in Medical Compounds.” U.S. Patent 152,939, issued July 14, 1874. https://patents.google.com/patent/US152939A/en
Peale, Albert C. Lists and Analyses of the Mineral Springs of the United States: A Preliminary Study. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 32. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1886. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b32
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Tennessee Place Names and Post Offices.” Nashville: Tennessee State Library and Archives. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com.s3.amazonaws.com/tsla/history/places/postoff1.htm
United States Post Office Department. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–1971. Record Group 28, National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-appointments
United States Post Office Department. Table of Post Offices in the United States, various editions. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices
United States Pension Bureau. List of Pensioners on the Roll, January 1, 1883. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883. https://archive.org/details/listofpensioners04unit
United States Board on Geographic Names. Decisions of the United States Geographic Board. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. https://www.usgs.gov/us-board-on-geographic-names
United States Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Map Collection and TopoView.” Reston, VA: United States Geological Survey. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
United States Geological Survey. “Knob Creek at Austin Springs, Tennessee, Station 03486667.” National Water Information System. https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/03486667/
United States Census Bureau. “Tennessee Enumeration District 90-32: Washington County, Civil District 10, Austin Springs.” Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940. National Archives and Records Administration. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1940_Census_Enumeration_District_Descriptions_-_Tennessee_-_Washington_County_-_ED_90-29,_ED_90-30,_ED_90-32,_ED_90-33,_ED_90-34,_ED_90-35,_ED_90-36_-_NARA_-_5881832.jpg
Tennessee Valley Authority. The Upper Holston Projects: Watauga, South Holston, Boone, and Fort Patrick Henry. Technical Report 14. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1958. https://archive.org/details/upperholstonproj00tenn
Tennessee Valley Authority. “Boone Reservoir.” Knoxville: Tennessee Valley Authority. https://www.tva.com/environment/lake-levels/boone
Tennessee Valley Authority, Division of Reservoir Properties. Boone Reservoir Properties, Sheet 2. 1959. Rare Maps Digital Collection, Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State University. https://archivesofappalachia.omeka.net/
United States Environmental Protection Agency. Report on Boone and South Holston Reservoirs: Washington, Sullivan, and Carter Counties, Tennessee. National Eutrophication Survey Working Paper. Washington, DC: Environmental Protection Agency. https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPURL.cgi?Dockey=91024JX8.TXT
Washington County Chancery Court. Leroy Dyer v. J. R. Clark and W. J. Collins, et al., 1889–1891. Box 151, Case 436. Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives, Jonesborough, Tennessee. https://wctnarchives.org/chancery-court-case-files/
Washington County Chancery Court. Christian and Crockett v. Austin and Company, et al. 1889. Box 151. Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives, Jonesborough, Tennessee. https://wctnarchives.org/chancery-court-case-files/
Washington County Circuit Court. State v. Bruce Hudson or Hutson and Rhea Hodge, 1887–1888. Box or Folder 211. Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives, Jonesborough, Tennessee. https://wctnarchives.org/circuit-court-case-files/
Washington County Circuit Court. State of Tennessee, et al. v. F. H. Austin and Brothers, et al. 1887. Box 212. Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives, Jonesborough, Tennessee. https://wctnarchives.org/circuit-court-case-files/
Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives. “County Clerk Records.” Record Group 5. Jonesborough, Tennessee. https://wctnarchives.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/rg-5-county-clerk-records.pdf
Washington County Department of Records Management and Archives. “Record Groups and Research Collections.” Jonesborough, Tennessee. https://wctnarchives.org/record-groups/
East Tennessee and Western North Carolina Railroad Historical Society. A Draft Documentary History of the Johnson City and Carnegie Street Railway, 1890–1902. https://www.etwncrrhs.org/art/historiesart/JohnsonCityTraction.pdf
James Agee Film Project. “Lester and Charlie Bowman, Austin Springs, 1934.” James Agee Film Project Photographs, 1875–1956, identifier 471-352. Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State University. https://archivesofappalachia.omeka.net/items/show/875
Archives of Appalachia. “Austin Springs.” Clifford A. Maxwell Photographs, 1940–1986, identifier 0297_00449. East Tennessee State University. https://archivesofappalachia.omeka.net/
Pollack, June, and Nancy Hags. “Austin Springs.” Watauga Association of Genealogists of Northeast Tennessee. https://wagsnetn.org/member-log-in-2/members-only-2/austin-springs/
Bailey, Chad F. “Heritage Tourism in Washington County, Tennessee: Linking Place, Placelessness, and Preservation.” Master’s thesis, East Tennessee State University, 2016. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3136/
Cox, Joyce, and W. Eugene Cox, eds. History of Washington County, Tennessee. Johnson City, TN: Overmountain Press, 2001. https://books.google.com/books/about/History_of_Washington_County_Tennessee.html?id=e9etswEACAAJ
Watauga Association of Genealogists. History of Washington County, Tennessee. Johnson City, TN: Watauga Association of Genealogists, 1988. https://wagsnetn.org/
Williams, Samuel Cole. History of Johnson City and Its Environs. Johnson City, TN: Watauga Press, 1940. https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupid?key=olbp106223
Miller, Larry L. Tennessee Place-Names. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. https://iupress.org/9780253108739/tennessee-place-names/
McGee, David. A History of East Tennessee Auto Racing: The Thrill of the Mountains. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2014. https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/products/9781626191372
Kozsuch, Mildred, and Ruth Broyles. “Washington County.” Tennessee Encyclopedia. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/washington-county/
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Genealogical Fact Sheets about Washington County.” Nashville: Tennessee State Library and Archives. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla/pages/genealogical-fact-sheets-about-washington-county
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Bibliography of Tennessee Local History Sources: Washington County.” Nashville: Tennessee State Library and Archives. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com/tsla/history/bibliographies/bibwashington.htm
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Wish You Were Here: Tennessee’s Historic Resorts.” Tennessee Virtual Archive. https://digitaltennessee.tnsos.gov/exhibit/wish-you-were-here/
Author Note: Austin Springs deserves to be remembered as more than a place name along the Watauga River. Its mineral resort, post office, fairgrounds, school, and racetrack reveal how a nineteenth-century watering place developed into a lasting Washington County community.