Appalachian Community Histories – Tate Springs, Grainger County: Mineral Water, Mountain Hotels, and a Springhouse That Still Remembers
Tate Springs sits near Bean Station in Grainger County, Tennessee, where Clinch Mountain, old travel routes, mineral water, and resort culture once met in one of East Tennessee’s best known health destinations. The place is quiet today compared with what it once was, but the records tell a much larger story. By the late nineteenth century, Grainger County had become part of a regional mineral springs tourism economy, and the Tennessee Encyclopedia identifies Tate’s Springs as the most famous of the county’s resorts, with mineral waters, baths, a large hotel, cabins, and a golf course.
The appeal began with water. In 1880, the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railroad Company promoted Tate Epsom Spring as a celebrated mineral spring ten miles north of Morristown, in Bean Station Valley at the southern base of Clinch Mountain. The railroad guide described a place reached by rail to Morristown and then by hack line, a reminder that Tate Springs belonged to both the mountain landscape and the transportation system that brought visitors into it.
Samuel Baker Tate and the First Hotel
The resort took its name from the Tate family. The University of Tennessee’s Tate Springs Hotel Registers finding aid states that Samuel Baker Tate bought 2,500 acres near Bean Station in 1865, including a mineral spring, and built the first Tate Springs Hotel on the property. That first hotel reportedly could hold 500 people, which shows how quickly the spring was imagined as more than a local landmark.
The exact early details are not always told the same way in later sources, but the basic pattern is clear. A spring with local reputation became a hotel property, and the hotel became a destination. In the years after the Civil War, when Americans increasingly traveled for health, climate, and scenery, Tate Springs stood in the right place at the right time.
Captain Thomas Tomlinson and the Resort Era
The major resort era began after Captain Thomas Tomlinson purchased the spring and hotel property from Tate in 1876. Tomlinson, a Civil War veteran, developed Tate Springs into a larger resort complex. Later additions included a middle section of the hotel in 1898, a west wing in 1900, and an east wing in 1905. By the early twentieth century, the hotel could accommodate up to 600 guests.
The resort eventually included far more than hotel rooms. The University of Tennessee finding aid describes 35 to 40 outbuildings, a ballroom, riding stables, a bathhouse and swimming pool built in 1924, a billiards room, tennis courts, a 100-acre park, and an 18-hole golf course built in 1925. This was not a small mountain inn. It was a full resort landscape, built around water, leisure, social display, and the promise of escape.
Tate Epsom Water and the Health Resort Market
Tate Springs was part of a larger nineteenth-century belief in mineral water as medicine. The 1886 United States Geological Survey publication by A. C. Peale listed Tate’s Epsom Spring at Tate Springs in Grainger County and classified it as saline and chalybeate, used commercially and as a resort. That official scientific listing helps explain why the water could be marketed beyond the hotel itself.
The resort’s advertisements made bold claims, as many mineral water advertisements did in that period. A 1908 advertisement in The Atlanta Georgian and News called Tate Spring “The Carlsbad of America” and promoted the resort’s improvements, amusements, golf, game and fish preserve, and mineral water. The claims should be read as historical advertising, not modern medical evidence, but they show how Tate Springs sold itself to visitors and water customers across the South.
The Railroad, the Registers, and the Guests
The railroad helped turn Tate Springs from a rural mineral spring into a regional and national resort. The 1880 railroad guide promised daily mail, telegram and express service, baggage checked through to the springs, music on the lawns and in the ballroom, and monthly rates that varied by season. It also instructed visitors to reach Morristown by rail and then take the authorized hack line to Tate Spring.
The surviving hotel registers make the resort feel less like a legend and more like a working business. The Tate Springs Hotel Registers at the University of Tennessee cover 1923 through 1940 and include hotel registers and guest cards. Guests recorded their names, cities of residence, check-in times, and room numbers, while guest cards tracked visits across the year. Notes and correspondence suggest that the hotel used some of this information to invite guests back for future stays.
Those records matter because resorts were built as much by repeat visitors as by buildings. Tate Springs was not only a hotel in Grainger County. It was a social world of arrivals, departures, rooms, meals, mineral water, mountain air, and return invitations.
Decline, Kingswood, and Fire
The same forces that helped build Tate Springs eventually faded. The University of Tennessee finding aid links the resort’s decline to the Great Depression and the rise of automobile travel, which weakened the older railroad-based resort pattern. Samuel Tate’s original hotel was demolished in 1936, and the resort closed in 1941.
In 1943, Kingswood School purchased the property and used the hotel as a school and dormitory. The building survived into that later chapter, but not permanently. It burned in 1963. Much of the old resort landscape was later altered by Cherokee Lake, Route 11W, and changing land use, leaving only fragments of what had once been one of Tennessee’s most famous resort properties.
A 1947 Tennessee State Library and Archives photograph of Tate Springs Hotel, from the Tennessee Department of Conservation Photograph Collection, is especially valuable because it documents the hotel after the resort era and before the 1963 fire.
The Springhouse That Remains
The most important surviving landmark is the Tate Springs Springhouse. The National Register nomination describes it as an octagonal wooden structure with two levels, a sloping red roof, bracketed arches around the spring, a narrow stairway, and a second level enclosed by a balustrade. The nomination also noted that the springhouse remained visible from Highway 11W in a rural setting.
The National Register form treated the springhouse as a local landmark tied to architecture and the history of the mineral spring resort. It was entered in the National Register on April 13, 1973. More recently, the Federal Register recorded additional documentation for Tate Springs Springhouse at 151 Kingswood Way near Bean Station, showing that the site still receives preservation attention.
Why Tate Springs Matters
Tate Springs matters because it shows a side of Appalachia that is sometimes overlooked. This was not only a place of farms, roads, churches, and small communities. It was also part of a national resort culture where mineral water, railroads, hotels, advertising, health claims, and mountain scenery came together.
The surviving springhouse is modest compared with the hotel that once stood nearby, but it carries the whole story in a smaller form. It remembers the water before the hotel, the visitors before the fire, and the Grainger County landscape that made Tate Springs one of the best known mineral resorts in East Tennessee.
Sources & Further Reading
Beasley, Ellen. “Tate Springs Spring House.” National Register of Historic Places Inventory/Nomination Form. Tennessee Historical Commission, 1973. National Park Service, NPGallery. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/eec7aecb-b038-45b6-80d3-02aaa7a1ae79/
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
Goodspeed Publishing Company. History of Tennessee from the Earliest Time to the Present: East Tennessee. Nashville: Goodspeed Publishing Company, 1887. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla/pages/genealogical-fact-sheets-about-grainger-county
Peale, A. C. Lists and Analyses of the Mineral Springs of the United States. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1886. https://archive.org/stream/listsandanalyse00pealgoog/listsandanalyse00pealgoog_djvu.txt
“Tate Springs Hotel Registers, 1923-1940.” MS-0198. Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tennessee Libraries, Knoxville. https://scout.lib.utk.edu/repositories/2/resources/2855
“Tate Springs Hotel Register, 1928 November 12-1929 January.” MS-0198. Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tennessee Libraries, Knoxville. https://scout.lib.utk.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/113772
“Tate Springs Hotel, Grainger County.” Tennessee State Library and Archives, Digital Tennessee, Tennessee Department of Conservation Photograph Collection, 1947. https://digitaltennessee.tnsos.gov/historicresorts/35/
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Accommodations.” Wish You Were Here: Retreat to Tennessee’s Historic Resorts. https://digitaltennessee.tnsos.gov/exhibit/wish-you-were-here/accommodations/
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Primm Springs: History of Tennessee Resorts.” Wish You Were Here: Retreat to Tennessee’s Historic Resorts. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com/tsla/exhibits/tnresorts/spring_histories.htm
National Park Service. “Pending List 2024 06 22.” National Register of Historic Places, June 26, 2024. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/pending-list-2024-06-22.htm
National Park Service. “National Register of Historic Places; Notification of Pending Nominations and Related Actions.” Federal Register 89, no. 127, July 2, 2024. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/07/02/2024-14506/national-register-of-historic-places-notification-of-pending-nominations-and-related-actions
U.S. Government Publishing Office. “National Register of Historic Places; Notification of Pending Nominations and Related Actions.” Federal Register 89, no. 127, July 2, 2024. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2024-07-02/pdf/2024-14506.pdf
Tennessee Historical Commission. “Tennessee Historical Commission Viewer.” https://tnmap.tn.gov/historicalcommission
Tennessee Historical Society. “Grainger County.” Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/grainger-county/
Tennessee History for Kids. “Grainger County.” https://www.tnhistoryforkids.org/history/counties/grainger-county/
Fanslow, M. F. “Resorts in Southern Appalachia: A Microcosm of American Culture.” Master’s thesis, East Tennessee State University, 2004. https://dc.etsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2118&context=etd
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Genealogical ‘Fact Sheets’ About Grainger County.” https://sos.tn.gov/tsla/pages/genealogical-fact-sheets-about-grainger-county
East Tennessee Crossing Byway. “Tate Springs: Tennessee’s Lost Mineral Water Resort and Golf Haven.” 2025. https://easttennesseecrossingbyway.com/tate-springs-tennessees-lost-mineral-water-resort-and-golf-haven/
Historical Marker Database. “Spring House.” https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=190544
Author Note: Tate Springs is one of those places where a surviving structure carries a much larger story than it first appears to hold. I have not visited the springhouse yet, but the records make it clear why this Grainger County resort deserves to be remembered.