Appalachian Community Histories – Lea Springs, Grainger County: Pryor Lea, Mineral Water, and a Lost East Tennessee Resort
Lea Springs sits in the records as both a place and a memory. It was not just a spring, not just a house, and not just a stop along an old East Tennessee road. It was a Grainger County landmark tied to the Lea family, the mineral-water resort age, the old road network between Knoxville and the upper Clinch Valley, and the small community life that continued long after the resort years faded.
The National Register of Historic Places nomination placed Lea Springs, sometimes called Lea Lakes, just off present-day Highway 11-W on Lea Lake Road. The United States Geological Survey identifies Lea Springs as a populated place in Grainger County, while National Park Service records later described the property as 11 miles southwest of Rutledge, west of U.S. 11 on Lea Lake Road. Those official records keep the place tied to the old road corridor that carried settlers, travelers, mail, and summer visitors through this part of East Tennessee.
Lea Springs appears early in federal transportation history. In an 1832 post-road act, Congress named a Tennessee route running from Newmarket in Jefferson County by Blain’s Cross Roads, Lea’s springs, Powder Spring Gap, Joseph Beelor’s, and on to Tazewell in Claiborne County. That small line in the Statutes at Large matters because it shows Lea’s Springs not only as a family seat or local landmark, but as a named point on a wider route through East Tennessee.
Pryor Lea and the Brick House
The house most associated with Lea Springs was built around 1819 for Pryor Lea. The National Register nomination described it as a brick Federal-style home with a back ell, large rooms, high ceilings, large windows, and a fanlight over the front entrance. The back portion included kitchen space and house servants’ quarters, with the second floor reached by a separate staircase. The nomination also stated that enslaved laborers were used in the building of the house and that most of the materials came from the site itself.
Pryor Lea belonged to one of Grainger County’s prominent early families. The National Register form tied the property to Major Lea, Pryor’s father, who came into the region in the early 1790s. It also connected the family to Richland, another Lea-associated property in Grainger County. In the nomination’s telling, the house at Lea Springs stood as a reminder of the family’s influence in East Tennessee and of Pryor Lea’s own public career.
Official congressional records identify Pryor Lea as a Tennessee lawyer and politician born in Knox County in 1794, before Grainger County’s 1796 formation. He graduated from Greeneville College, studied law, was admitted to the bar in 1817, served in the Creek War, became United States attorney for Tennessee in 1824, and represented Tennessee in Congress from 1827 to 1831. He later moved to Mississippi and then Texas, where he became involved in railroad building and public affairs before his death in Goliad in 1879.
The Waters That Drew Travelers
The spring gave the place its wider reputation. The National Register nomination said the mineral springs in front of the house made Lea Springs famous during the 1880s, and it called the area a resort and health region. In its continuation sheet, the form stated that by the 1880s Lea Springs had become one of the South’s famous resorts, with its reputation tied especially to the hot sulphur springs near the house.
The resort world around Lea Springs can be seen in railroad guides and newspaper advertisements. A guide published for the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railroad described Lea’s Springs in Grainger County as a watering place in the Clinch Mountain region, cooler than Knoxville, with chalybeate, black sulphur, and white sulphur waters. It listed daily hack service from McMillins and Knoxville and named W. H. Bates as proprietor.
A June 1886 advertisement in The Hamilton Journal used the common newspaper misspelling “Granger County” but clearly meant Lea’s Springs in East Tennessee. It advertised the resort as 21 miles from Knoxville by railroad or daily hack, with mountain and cave scenery, mineral waters, hot and cold sulphur baths, new buildings, amusements, and M. J. Hughes as proprietor. Other Georgia newspaper ads in the 1880s and 1890s repeated the same selling points, showing that Lea’s Springs was marketed beyond Grainger County and East Tennessee.
The waters also entered government mineral-springs literature. In 1886, A. C. Peale’s United States Geological Survey bulletin, Lists and Analyses of the Mineral Springs of the United States, listed Lea’s Springs near Spring House in Grainger County. That listing placed Lea Springs among the many mineral-water sites that nineteenth-century Americans grouped together as places of health, travel, and local enterprise.
A Resort Among East Tennessee Curiosities
Lea Springs did not stand alone in the imagination of East Tennessee travelers. In 1882, Southern World reprinted a Knoxville correspondent’s description of “Natural Curiosities of East Tennessee,” placing the great Indian cave north of New Market only a short distance from Lea’s Springs. The article also mentioned Grainger County’s group of mineral waters as part of the region’s broader scenic and resort identity.
That kind of description helps explain why Lea Springs was promoted as more than a place to drink water. Advertisements emphasized cool air, mountain scenery, caves, drives, music, dancing, and comfortable rooms. The mineral water was the center of the claim, but the resort business depended on a larger promise: escape from heat, illness, routine, and city life.
For visitors from Knoxville, Georgia, the Carolinas, or other parts of the South, Lea Springs offered the kind of seasonal retreat that many nineteenth-century resort communities advertised. The language was familiar across the region. The water was said to help the body. The mountains were said to refresh the mind. The road or railroad made the place reachable, but the spring and scenery made it worth the trip.
The Community After the Resort Years
Lea Springs was also a community, not only a resort name. The Tennessee State Library and Archives place-name and post-office listing gives Leas Springs in Grainger County from 1883 to 1936. A local Grainger County post-office compilation based on TSLA and USGS data lists Leas Springs from 1883 to 1936 and Lea Springs from 1936 to 1939, showing both the older spelling and the later spelling transition.
Those post-office dates are important because they show Lea Springs as a lived place where people received mail, gave directions, buried family members, and recorded births and deaths. One Grainger County death-certificate transcription for Francis Jo Ann Dalton, who died in 1936, recorded her birth at “Lea Spring,” residence at death in Lea Springs, Civil District 3, and burial at Lea Springs. Small records like that pull the place out of resort advertising and back into ordinary community life.
The Lea Springs name also survived in visual records. The University of Tennessee’s postcard catalog describes postcards of Lea’s Springs, including one used in 1909 that depicted a hotel at Lea’s Springs and another used in 1911. Those postcards are useful reminders that the resort was not only written about in government records and advertisements. It was photographed, mailed, and remembered by travelers and residents.
Decline, Revival, and Restoration
The National Register nomination described the decline of Lea Springs after the financial panic of the 1890s. In the 1920s, interest revived, and investors added a large dining room and ballroom as part of an effort to return the place to use as a health resort. The plan did not fully succeed. The Great Depression brought another decline, and Lea Springs fell into disuse.
After World War II, Tillman J. Keller purchased Lea Springs and restored the property. The National Register form stated that Keller used it primarily as a weekend residence and acquired about 1,000 acres of farm and woodland around the house. When the property was documented for the National Register, it still retained enough of its old form and setting to be nominated as a historic building tied to politics, industry, family history, and the resort era.
The 1973 National Register photographs preserve a last official visual record of the house in that period. Jon Coddington’s photo documentation recorded the front elevation, rear elevation with the dining room and ballroom addition, and other views, with negatives filed at the Tennessee Historical Commission. These images are now among the most important surviving official records for understanding how Lea Springs looked before later loss and change.
A Landmark Removed from the Register
Lea Springs was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, but its federal listing did not last. In June 2023, the Federal Register published notice that a request for removal had been made for Lea Springs in Grainger County. The National Park Service Weekly List then recorded Lea Springs as removed from the National Register on June 20, 2023.
That removal does not erase the place from history. It changes where the memory has to be carried. Instead of relying on a standing landmark alone, researchers have to follow the paper trail: the 1832 post road, the Lea family record, the mineral-springs guides, the newspaper advertisements, the post-office listings, the postcards, the death certificates, the National Register nomination, and the 1973 photographs.
Lea Springs is one of those Appalachian places where the story is larger than what survives on the ground. It began in the records as a family property and a named point on a road. It became a resort where people came for mineral water, mountain air, and the promise of health. It remained a community name long after the old resort language faded. Today, its history rests in scattered sources, but those sources still point back to the same Grainger County place, beside the old road and the springs that gave it a name.
Sources & Further Reading
Jon Coddington. “Lea Springs.” National Register of Historic Places Inventory, Nomination Form. National Park Service, 1975. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/75001754_text
Jon Coddington. “Lea Springs.” National Register of Historic Places Property Photograph Forms. National Park Service, October 1973. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/75001754_photos
National Park Service. “Weekly List 2023 06 23.” National Register of Historic Places, June 23, 2023. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/weekly-list-2023-06-23.htm
Federal Register. “National Register of Historic Places; Notification of Pending Nominations and Related Actions.” 88 FR 36333, June 2, 2023. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/06/02/2023-11799/national-register-of-historic-places-notification-of-pending-nominations-and-related-actions
United States Statutes at Large. 22nd Congress, 1st Session, Chapter 141, 1832. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-4/pdf/STATUTE-4-Pg534-2.pdf
East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railroad Company. Guide to the Summer Resorts and Watering Places of East Tennessee. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/Guide_to_the_summer_resorts_and_watering_places_of_East_Tennessee_%28IA_guidetosummerres00east%29.pdf
Peale, A. C. Lists and Analyses of the Mineral Springs of the United States: A Preliminary Study. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 32. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1886. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b32
“Lea’s Springs.” The Hamilton Journal, June 18, 1886. https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn89053105/1886-06-18/ed-1/seq-7/
“Natural Curiosities of East Tennessee.” Southern World, August 1, 1882. https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn94058024/1882-08-01/ed-1/seq-7/
“Lea’s Springs.” The Dalton Argus, July 30, 1892. https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn89053937/1892-07-30/ed-1/seq-5/ocr/
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Tennessee Place Names and Post Offices.” https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com/tsla/history/places/postoff3.htm
United States Geological Survey. “Lea Springs.” Geographic Names Information System. https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/gaz-record/1314267
U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives. “LEA, Pryor.” https://history.house.gov/People/Listing/L/LEA%2C-Pryor-%28L000166%29/
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. “Lea, Pryor, 1794–1879.” https://bioguide.congress.gov/search/bio/L000166
Texas State Historical Association. “Pryor Lea.” Handbook of Texas. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/lea-pryor
University of Tennessee Libraries. “East Tennessee Postcards, MS.3777.” ArchivesSpace Public Interface. https://scout.lib.utk.edu/repositories/2/resources?field%5B%5D=title&filter_fields%5B%5D=subjects&filter_fields%5B%5D=subjects&filter_values%5B%5D=Postcards.&filter_values%5B%5D=Postcards.&from_year%5B%5D=&limit=resource&op%5B%5D=&q%5B%5D=%2A&sort=title_sort+asc&to_year%5B%5D=
Fanslow, Mary F. “Resorts in Southern Appalachia: A Microcosm of American Resorts in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” Master’s thesis, East Tennessee State University, 2004. https://dc.etsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2118&context=etd
Roach, Thomas E. Richland Valley: A History of Grainger County, Tennessee. Knoxville, 1966. https://www.worldcat.org/title/richland-valley-a-history-of-grainger-county-tennessee/oclc/1698605
Grainger County Genealogy & History. “Grainger County Post Offices, 1803–1971.” https://grainger.tngenealogy.net/grainger-county-post-offices-1803-1971
Grainger County Genealogy & History. “Some Dalton Death Certificates.” https://grainger.tngenealogy.net/some-dalton-death-certificates
Library of Congress. “Military Map of Part of East Tennessee.” Geography and Map Division. https://www.loc.gov/maps/?fa=location:east+tennessee
Library of Congress. “Tennessee Maps.” Geography and Map Division. https://www.loc.gov/maps/?fa=location:tennessee
Tennessee Historical Commission. “National Register of Historic Places in Tennessee.” https://www.tn.gov/historicalcommission/federal-programs/national-register.html
Tennessee Historical Commission. “Historic Preservation.” https://www.tn.gov/historicalcommission/federal-programs.html
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Appalachian Counties Served by ARC.” https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-counties-served-by-arc/
Appalachian Regional Commission. “East Tennessee Development District.” https://www.arc.gov/ldd/east-tennessee-development-district/
Author Note: Lea Springs is the kind of place where the story has to be rebuilt from scattered records, old advertisements, maps, postcards, and preservation files. I wanted this article to treat it as more than a lost resort, because the name also belonged to a real Grainger County community.