TTHN Ep 3 - The LOST Resort

There was a time when people traveled from across the region to a quiet corner of Tennessee—not for business, not for politics, but for healing.

Tucked away in Warren County, Nicholson Springs Resort was once a thriving destination. Visitors came for the mineral waters, the scenery, and the promise of restoration. For a season, it flourished.

And then… it was gone.

In this episode of The Tennessee History Nerd, we uncover the story of Nicholson Springs Resort—how it rose, why it mattered, and how something so significant could seemingly disappear from memory.

Because Tennessee isn’t just full of the stories we remember.
It’s full of the ones we’ve forgotten.

So grab your favorite beverage, find a comfortable place, and let’s go find what’s left of a place that time almost erased.

Sources

• Summers, M. (1986). Nicholson Springs Resort Hotel: A Nineteenth-Century Spa. Tennessee Historical Quarterly, 45(3), 244–255.
  https://www.jstor.org/stable/42626611
  
  
• Tennessee Encyclopedia (2023). Entries: “Historic Resorts” and “Warren County”
  https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net

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Hosted by Big John Summers
Produced by Summers Media Enterprises

Music by Big John Summers

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to The Tennessee History Nerd. This is a podcast dedicated to Tennessee's past. Every week we bring you a new story about the people, places, and events that have shaped Tennessee and made it and us who and what we are. So grab your favorite beverage, find a comfortable place, and sit back and enjoy. If you try to find Nicholson Springs by car today, you won't be able to. You can drive the back roads of Warren County and circle the area all you want, but the old resort site doesn't sit on a roadside anymore. It's back off the beaten path on private land, and it's at least a quarter mile from any pavement, tucked behind trees and time. When I was in high school, I crossed that overgrowth with some others and we stood near what was left of it. It was just a pile of bricks from a collapsed old chimney and enough traces left to know that something once stood here that mattered. The silence felt heavier than the summer air. It's the kind of place that you can miss even when you're standing right on top of it. But just over a century ago, this was a destination. Tennessee, like much of the South, caught mineral spring fever in the 19th century. And the idea was simple and older than the Republic itself. People believed that certain waters, mineral-rich, sulfurous, iron tinged, could restore health and spirit. Across the state, resorts grew up around springs, and summer seasons became a social rhythm. Arrivals by wagon or rail, shared tables, porches full of talk and card games, and long walks to the spring house where you'd take the waters and hope they'd take your troubles. Nicholson Springs belonged to that world. It rose on a bluff over the Barren Fork River in Warren County, close enough to McMinville to feel connected, but far enough to feel like you'd gotten away, truly gotten away. And the first name associated with the place in the historical record is the Crisp family. And that's the reason it has the older name Chris Springs for the community. But then crucially, the next name associated with it was a physician, Dr. J.W. Ransom of Murfreesboro. In 1881, Dr. Ransom acquired the property and did what medical entrepreneurs of that era often did when they saw a lively spring and a market full of hope. He built a resort to match the promise of the water. Dr. Ransom's vision was both practical and aspirational. It was practical because a country doctor knew what urban summers did to people, fevers, exhaustion, chronic ailments that were all worsened by heat and work. But it was aspirational because he also knew what a beautiful setting and rest could do for the soul. So Nicholson Springs, as the place would eventually be known, developed the features that were familiar to that era's spa culture. They had lodging, a spring house, promenades under shade, and a routine that mixed rest with gentle regimen. Drink the waters, walk the grounds, keep hours, and trust the season to do its work. If you consider it in your mind's eye long enough, you begin to picture the cadence of the day. Morning cool and pale, mist rising off the river, a few early voices down on the path going down to the spring, midday meals from a kitchen that knew how to feed company, farm staples that were dressed up just enough to feel festive, afternoon chairs on the porch, men talking about crops or politics, women comparing letters or summer fashion, and children hurrying through games that made adults nervous and older guests smile. Then in the evening there would be lamps and music, maybe a piano, the sound of a tune that drifted just maybe a little too far into the trees. Resort life was ordinary life with the rough edges polished, and it was that polish that the people came for. But names changed stories, and the name from Chris Springs to Nicholson Springs tells us where this story goes next. After Dr. Ransom, the property passed to Mrs. Electa Nicholson of Nashville. And her tenure is the one that really fixed the resort's identity for the wider world because it was under Mrs. Nicholson that the place changed. It didn't just offer water, it offered reputation. The resort gained social standing. It was known as the most prestigious. That was what later descriptions would remember it as in contrast with other Tennessee Springs. It was drawing guests who were not merely sick, but also seasoning. They were escaping city heat. They were mingling. They were networking in the way that Southerners did when summer homes and hotels served as both relief and rendezvous. And so that word prestigious can be misleading if you hear it as stuffy. But the best resorts weren't lifeless parlors, they were lived in. They pulsed with the local music of conversation, of work happening behind the scenes, and the rituals of arrival that always feel hopeful, you know, trunks unloading, the first drink at the springhouse, and a chair that somehow fits you just right. Nicholson Springs appears to be one of those places that made an impression on the people that came. Enough of an impression that their letters and clippings and the resorts materials survived long enough for later historians to piece together the picture. Now, Mineral Spring culture in Tennessee didn't grow up in a vacuum. It flourished because the state was well positioned geographically, climatically, and culturally to host summer people. Rail and road improved access in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and newspapers spread the idea that these waters could cure everything from nerves to digestion. And physicians lent the language of health to what was also a market of leisure. So across Tennessee, names like Red Boiling Springs, Bursheba Springs, Bon Aqua, and Montvale became familiar, and each claimed its own mineral mixture and method. Nicholson Springs joined that chorus with its own chemical signature and its setting in Warren County's rolling terrain. Now I have to say this plainly because historical memory can be selective. Spring resorts weren't hospitals. They were businesses built on the borderland between medicine and hospitality. And yet if you read the period sources with honesty and humility, you can see why they mattered. People arrived frail and left feeling better. Was it the water? Maybe sometimes. Was it the rest, the better food, the rhythm, the absence of city soot? Almost certainly. Was it faith in the possibility of feeling better? That might have been the best medicine that they served. When Nicholson Springs changed hands from physician to proprietor, from Dr. Ransom to Mrs. Nicholson, the business model matured. The resort leaned into its identity as a summer sanitarium of sorts, curated rest under watchful management. That pattern fit a broader southern trend in which many Mineral Spring hotels were run by strong owners who set standards and cultivated clientele. And Mrs. Nicholson's stewardship is remembered in exactly that light. In fact, it's a meaningful detail that her name remains attached to the place in memory, Nicholson Springs. Women were often crucial to the management, marketing, and social life of these resorts, and her imprint shows in the way that the resort is remembered. And then we have to face unfortunately what every resort story eventually faces decline. Some combination of cultural shifts, medical skepticism, automobiles changing travel patterns, and in this case also the hammer blow of the Great Depression thinning the crowds. Sources record that Nicholson Springs declined and in time was destroyed by fire in the 1930s. This was a devastating end that paradoxically may actually have served to preserve the site's aura by preventing a shabby afterlife. No half-kept tourist trap survived to tarnish the memory. The resort exited the stage almost entirely, leaving scholars and locals with documents and recollections and this quiet site in the woods. If you ask why the story still pulls at me, it's because Nicholson Springs is a Tennessee mirror. We recognize ourselves in these places, the way our state sits between country and city, between faith and common sense medicine, between family gatherings and public institutions. Springs were the meeting point. People brought their aches and their ambitions and met in the middle to rest for a while. And though the resort is gone, the shape of that life remains in the record for those who have enough patience to read it and enough kindness not to trespass trying to see it. Because if you drive through the Chris Springs community today, it's not there. The old Chris Springs market that's still in operation today at the intersection of Chris Springs Road and Old Shelbeaver Road, well, it's there. And the community kept its identity even after the resort changed hands and changed its name. It's still Chris Springs. And I like that. Names have long memories here. Nicholson Springs may have vanished from the roadmaps, but Chris Springs endures. And it ties this little corner of Warren County to the family who settled it first and to the water that gave it life. Just across from the Chris Springs Market on a little rise just across Chris Springs Road sits the Crisp Family Cemetery. It's a small, untidy plot beneath a grove of trees. When I was a teenager, I trimmed it with a weed eater. Even then I recognized the historical significance, even though it was just a summer chore that paid a few dollars and kept the place respectable. But by that point, my mom had already done the research and written the story published at about the same time in the Tennessee Historical Quarterly that informed what you're now hearing. So even then, it was exciting to realize how close I was to the heart of the story my mom had written about. How we were so very close to a pretty special story that took place in that otherwise quiet and unassuming community. Those headstones in that cemetery marked the final resting place for the people whose land and name framed everything that followed. The resort, the visitors, even the community's reputation for hospitality. A few hundred yards to the south of the cemetery, beyond the fields there and across the Barren Fork River, hidden behind the trees up on the bluff, lies what's left of the old Nicholson Springs Resort. There's not much to see. Like I said, it's just a pile of bricks that were likely once the one of the structures' chimneys or perhaps remnants of a foundation. There aren't any standing timbers or anything otherwise obvious to the casual eye. But if you ask the right person, it's possible to locate the place at the top of the bluff where the hotel once stood. And if you stand there in the right light, you can imagine the veranda catching the afternoon light. Even the springs themselves are difficult to find, if it's even possible today. They're victims of the dropping water table as increased population and usage has lowered the level of the aquifer that fed them. The Barren Fork River that ran beside the property still moves steadily, though the water level sits a good bit lower than the descriptions in the old papers. But a century ago, the river carried laughter and the splash of bathers and linen. Even now, farms still dot the landscape in the area along the banks of the river. But more and more these are being replaced by housing developments and subdivisions to satisfy the growing demand for housing in the area. The physical continuity between those two worlds says a lot about Tennessee. We rarely erase, we repurpose. Right there on a neighboring road in the same community sits a building that ties the story to my own family. My great-grandmother used to make and sell butter to the resort's kitchen when it was running in full season. Her house still stands. It's the one that the A and K termite and pest control business uses for their office and headquarters now. So when I read my mom's research about Nicholson Springs, I'm not looking at an abstract past. I'm reading about my neighbors, my kin, and the bluff that extended across to behind the house I grew up on. The resort's guests may have come from Nashville or Chattanooga, but the people who kept it alive came from right there in that community. The original name, Chris Springs, points to that rootedness. In the years before Dr. Ransom bought the property, local families already used the river and the springs themselves for practical purposes, for watering stock, for cooling milk, and on especially hot days for swimming. When Dr. Ransom turned the springs into a resort in 1881, he was simply formalizing something that the community already understood, that the water was good and that the people would travel to be near it. By the time Mrs. Alecta Nicholson of Nashville took over, that understanding had become an enterprise. She built upon Dr. Ransom's physical improvements and gave the place its refined edge, a hotel with galleries and parlors, an orderly routine, and as contemporary accounts describe it, the elegance of rest. Guests arrived by rail to the little depot in the Smart community, still known by local residents as Smart Station, and finished the journey by carriage ride. So the register would have listed names recognizable from Nashville Society columns and from other springs across the South. For a few seasons in the late 19th century, Nicholson Springs ranked among Tennessee's premier mineral resorts. Its visitors seeking both health and status. The rhythm of the day there followed the same gentle choreography found at places like Bursheba Springs or Montvale, morning walks through the spring house, a prescribed number of glasses of the mineral water, breakfast in the dining hall, rest under the oaks, afternoon drives, evening gatherings filled with music and lanterns. Newspapers of the period referred to these routines as taking the cure. But most patrons came just as much for community as they did for the chemistry. What set Nicholson Springs apart, according to surviving descriptions, was its balance of formality and familiarity. The Nicholson's management created rules that maintained decorum, dress codes at dinner, quiet hours in the evening, but the surrounding farmland kept the atmosphere grounded. Local children delivered produce, dairymen supplied milk, and craftspeople mended furniture and wagons. My great grandmother's butter fit neatly into that pattern. Local goods sustained the visiting society. Every pat of butter and every jar of preserves carried a little bit of Warren County's flavor into the dining room. For historians, those exchanges blurred the line between resort and community. The same wagons that carried trunks and passengers also carried eggs and vegetables. And when the season ended, the people of Chris Springs resumed their quieter rhythms, folding the resort back into the countryside until the next train load of visitors appeared in the next season. Standing on that ground today, or I should say standing near it since the property is private, you can almost hear both worlds at once. The hush of a forgotten clearing and the steady background of modern life, the rush of traffic on old Shelbyville Highway nearby, maybe the sound of a nearby tractor or the machinery hum from the bridgestone plant a couple of miles away. History doesn't vanish here, it layers, and every layer has its own sound. When we study resorts like Nicholson Springs, we often focus on architecture or ownership, but what lingers in the soil is habit. People learned generation by generation that a Tennessee summer demanded adaptation. Before air conditioning, before paved roads, you sought altitude, shade, and moving water. And that's what these resorts offered, a microclimate of mercy, the same logic that shaped Burshby Springs on the plateau and Red Bowling Springs in Macon County. They were sibling experiments in comfort. Find a place where the heat breaks and let the body mend itself. Nicholson Springs belonged fully to that family of places, though it's nearly forgotten now. Its disappearance had less to do with failure than with transformation. The resort economy shifted with cars and medicine. People found new ways to rest and new explanations for their aches. What remained was the community, the Chris Springs name, the farms, the church, the cemetery, and the memories that connected all of them. When you study a place that's gone, you eventually reach a wall of silence. Nicholson Springs is like that. The outlines of the story are clear, the years of growth, the elegance of its heyday, the subsequent decline and end, but the voices that filled those rooms are now gone. To my knowledge, no guest lists or account books survived. They may have existed once, but what became of them when the resort closed, whether discarded, burned, or simply packed away in an attic somewhere, no one can say. The only lists left are the names that surface indirectly in newspaper blurbs or family letters, people from Nashville or Murfreesboro who went down to the springs for a fortnight or returned much improved in health. Those phrases are faint echoes of a culture that believes strongly in both civility and cure. What we do know about the operating years comes from the physical descriptions and from the patterns shared by other Tennessee spas of the same era. Nicholson Springs ran on a seasonal rhythm. Spring cleaning there wasn't a metaphor, it meant literal reopening. By May, the caretakers would have whitewashed the fences and repaired any winter damage. Guests usually arrived in May or June and stayed until late August or into September. The hotel and cottages could house at least 250 guests, maybe more when families doubled up. The day's schedule revolved around the spring house meals and social calls. Dr. Ransom's early advertisements emphasized the health aspect, pure chalib, water and invigorating air, and I hope I pronounced that type of water correctly, but it's an unusual term. But under Mrs. Nicholson, the emphasis widened to refinement and reputation, music in the evenings, well-appointed parlors, polite company. It became as much about being seen as being healed. The economic base that supported these resorts, though, Was fragile. They required the steady patronage of families wealthy enough to take a season off, but not so wealthy that they fled north entirely. Rail travel helped at first. The line to McMinville with the whistle stop and smart station made Nicholson accessible, but the same rail network that brought guests also brought competition. And when automobiles arrived, loyalty scattered. People could chase novelty instead of returning to the same resort year after year after year. Add to that the changing medical landscape, new drugs, public health campaigns, and a growing skepticism toward mineral cures. And so by the 1920s, taking the waters sounded old fashioned. By the 1930s, the depression made it impossible for most families to be able to afford such leisure. Local memory fills the gap between the last good season and the fire. By all accounts, the resort closed quietly. Without guests, the building stood empty, but not unused. In hard times, empty structures draw the desperate, travelers, transients, people looking for a dry place to sleep. Sometime in the nineteen thirties, fire consumed the hotel. The blaze most likely happened when one of those temporary occupants tried to warm themselves or cook, and the fire got out of control. There's no official record of an investigation. It was simply gone. The timbers collapsed into themselves, and by the time anyone reached the scene, there wasn't much to save. Few chimneys, later scattered bricks, and the faint outline of a foundation were all that remained. And that kind of ending is heartbreak and mercy mixed. Heartbreak because a piece of local pride disappeared. But mercy because without half ruined buildings, there wasn't anything to tempt vandals or souvenir hunters. Nature reclaimed the bluff quickly. By the time I walked there in high school, the woods had already swallowed the clearing, only the pile of old bricks from a long forgotten chimney and some of the rock used for foundations, and the view toward the river gave away where people once sat on porches and listened to the crickets and tree frogs under the lantern light. The Nicholson Springs fire falls into a wider pattern across Tennessee. Bon Aqua declined. Montvale's buildings rotted. Red Boiling Springs survived by reinventing itself as a hotel for automobile travelers, but in November 2025, the magnificent old Donahoe hotel there suffered the same fate as the Nicholson Springs Hotel. It was destroyed by fire. But in Warren County, the resort era simply ended. Families stayed, farms evolved, industry came, and Chris Springs settled back into being a quiet community with a remarkable footnote. The water kept running, the land kept producing. The memory of the resort, though, slipped into the category of things we used to have, and then simply into nothingness. People in the community simply forgot about it. When mom published her study in 1986, she pulled Nicholson Springs from that oblivion. She assembled scraps, old documents, local histories, newspaper mentions, oral history into a coherent picture and just in time, too, because as I recall, at least one of the people she interviewed who remembered the old hotel passed away before mom's article could even be published. Reading it now, I'm reminded that local history isn't just about preservation, it's about attention. Once something is written down and shared, it becomes part of the conversation again. People who had nearly forgotten suddenly remember a story their grandparents told about the old hotel or the spring down the river. A place reenters living memory simply because someone cared enough to tell its story. And every generation needs those caretakers. The Crisp Family Cemetery is only occasionally tended now. Crisp Springs Market still serves the community, the bluff still rises above the meandering Barren Fork River, and under that continuity runs the unseen thread of water, the same groundwater that fed the resort's springs. Even if the flow is now weakened, it's the same aquifer, it's the same geology that shaped both the resort and the farms that survived it. Standing there today, you can feel how the landscape itself remembers. The air still carries that cool freshness near the river. The bluff still faces north, catching the same breezes that guests once felt relaxing on the veranda. I have imagined the sound of that last fire echoing across the fields, wood crackling, sparks scattering into the dark, and then the long silence afterward. But from that silence the land began to heal, and eventually it handed the story back to us to keep. Nicholson Springs may be gone, but it continues to teach. It shows how quickly prosperity can fade when the world shifts around it, and how easily stories vanish if nobody writes them down. It also shows the strength of a place that refuses to disappear entirely. The community, the cemetery, the river, and the memory all remain. History isn't about ruins, it's about the persistence of meaning. I suppose that's what I love most about telling these stories. Even when the buildings are gone, even when the records are lost, a place like Nicholson Springs still has something to say if we're willing to listen. Nicholson Springs Resort is now but a memory. But there are other memories with stories to tell all over the state. Next time, we're going to travel to Nashville and then travel the world with a group of talented and dedicated former slaves on a quest to save their university. Join me next time for episode four Singing for Glory wherever you download your podcasts. But until then, I'm Big John Summers, the Tennessee History Nerd, and I am history. For this episode, I relied heavily on the research of my mom, Marie Summers, particularly her article on Nicholson Springs, published in the fall 1986 Tennessee Historical Quarterly, along with material from Tennessee Encyclopedia.net. I've listed the main sources in the show notes if you'd like to explore further. And for our Patreon Pocket Protector subscribers, there's also a full interview with Marie Summers available that goes deeper into the story behind Nicholson Springs.