HistoricSiteMarkers
Reconstruction & Gilded Age

Blount Springs

Blount County, Blount County, Alabama

Marker Inscription

Blount Springs Famous health resort 1843-1914 Here fashionable ladies and gentlemen of the South vacationed with their families.

Erected by Alabama Historical Association

The Story

From the 1840s until the eve of the First World War, Blount Springs was one of the South's fashionable mineral-water resorts, its sulfur springs drawing well-to-do families seeking health and leisure. Guests arrived by rail to hotels and cottages for the summer season, part of a 19th-century American vogue for 'taking the waters.' The resort's long run ended in the early 20th century.

Why it matters

Blount Springs captures the Gilded Age culture of Southern spa resorts, a vanished world of leisure and railroad tourism that shaped how Americans traveled and vacationed.

Own a business near here? Add it to the map.

Themes & tags

Nearby & related markers

The Old Courthouse Bell

Oneonta, AL

This memorial preserves the bell from Blount County's old courthouse, which called the community to its civic business for decades until 1954. Rung to mark court sessions, alarms, and gatherings, a courthouse bell was once the voice of the county seat in an age before sirens and telephones. Local civic groups came together in 1960 to save the bell and set it here as a keepsake of Oneonta's earlier days.

Henry Wilson Sweet

Bessemer, AL

Henry Wilson Sweet (1902โ€“1990) was a mid-20th-century Alabama public servant whose career touched the economic and civic life of Jefferson County, Bessemer, and the state. As a county commissioner he helped secure the land that brought the University of Alabama's medical center to Birmingham, and as director of the state docks he oversaw a period when the Port of Mobile reached its highest national ranking. He also ran for governor in 1954 and led national and international port and civic organizations.

Evolution of the Black Warrior-Tombigbee Waterway

Tuscaloosa, AL

This marker traces how engineers tamed the Black Warrior River for navigation, beginning in 1875 with work to clear snags, trim overhanging trees, and dredge shallow shoals. In 1886 the U.S. Congress authorized three locks to carry boats past the Tuscaloosa Falls, the start of a lock-and-dam system that would open Alabama's interior to steamboat and barge traffic. It captures the Gilded Age push to engineer American rivers into reliable commercial highways.

King Bowstring Bridge

Tuscaloosa County, AL

In the late nineteenth century, crossing a wide, working river like the Black Warrior meant iron and timber spans engineered to carry wagons and early traffic. The King Bowstring Bridge was one of four spans that reached across the river between 1882 and 1896, part of the surge of bridge-building that knit growing Alabama communities together. The distinctive bowstring design โ€” an arched top chord tied by a straight lower beam โ€” was a favored form of the era's ambitious ironwork.