page_title: Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee
section_title: Tourist attraction
hierarchical_section_title: Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee / History / Tourist attraction
caption_attribution_description: English: The Thomas House Bed &amp; Breakfast, listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Cloyd Hotel, in Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee, USA. This is an image of a place or building that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the United States of America. Its reference number is 86002855
context_page_description: Red Boiling Springs is a city in Macon County, Tennessee, United States. The population was 1,112 at the 2010 census.
context_section_description: In 1873, a stagecoach line was established between Red Boiling Springs and Gallatin, where there was a railroad stop.  This likely led to renewed commercial interest in the springs, and by 1876, a general store owner named James Bennett had purchased the springs tract and had built a hotel.  Bennett's hotel consisted of a row of log cabins flanking a central frame dining hall.  In the late 1870s, Nashville newspapers first started mentioning Bennett's hotel and its guests' activities, as it was vogue during the Gilded Age for newspapers to report on daily happenings at upper class and upper-middle class resorts.
  The 1880s saw a boom in the development of mineral springs resorts as "summer getaways," due in part to the publicity received by places such as Saratoga Springs in New York.  During this decade, New York businessman James F. O. Shaugnesy purchased the Red Boiling Springs tract and began development of the area as a resort.  In 1889, the town first made the Nashville newspapers' front pages when former Tennessee Governor John C. Brown died of a hemorrhage at one of the hotels. The papers emphasized that due to the isolation of the town and a lack of a telephone or telegraph, there was no way to get help.  During the following decade, a railroad line was extended to Hartsville, and the railroad established a stagecoach line to Red Boiling Springs.  With the continued rise in the number of visitors, two local general store owners— Zack and Clay Cloyd— opened the Cloyd Hotel during this period.
  In 1905, several investors formed the Red Boiling Springs Water and Realty Company, and the following year purchased the original springs tract from Shaughnesy.  By 1916, the company had replaced Shaughnesy's hotel with a lavish 64-room structure named "The Palace."  During this same period, road improvements allowed the stagecoach lines to be replaced with automobile taxis, reducing the travel time from the railroad to just three hours.  In 1918 there were four hotels in town— the Palace, the Cloyd, the Donoho, and the Central Hotel; a decade later that number doubled and soon after, over a dozen hotels and at least that many boarding houses had been erected to take advantage of tourism.  The hotels all followed a similar design plan— two stories with elegant verandas spanning the facade, and interiors containing large dining halls and 50 to 60 rooms (some later doubled or tripled their roomspace with annexes).
  While most mineral water resorts fell out of favor as medical science began to question the healing properties of mineral springs, Red Boiling Springs persisted, reaching its peak in the 1920s and 1930s.  The resort was visited by many famous personages in the first half of the 20th century. The hotel registers included the names of judges, lawyers, heads of business and industry, famous musicians and singers, and politicians, among them Jo Byrns; Al Gore, Sr.; Nathan Bachman; Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who sent a beautiful French tapestry that hung in the main lobby of the Donoho Hotel; and most notably President Woodrow Wilson.  Although the Great Depression destroyed many Americans' disposable incomes and hence budget for travel, Red Boiling Springs still had large numbers of visitors.  The Summer of 1936 brought over 14,000 people to the little hamlet of approximately 800.
caption: The Thomas House, formerly the Cloyd Hotel
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