Dr. William Bowles, a physician and land speculator from nearby Paoli, built a three-story wooden hotel here around 1845, drawn by sulfur springs the local Miami and Shawnee peoples, along with French fur traders, had known about for generations, and which state surveyors had tried and failed to mine for salt two decades earlier. Bowles marketed the mineral water’s supposed cures for everything from gout to alcoholism, eventually branding it Pluto Water after the springs’ most famous source.
A fire destroyed most of his original hotel in 1897, and in 1901 former Indianapolis mayor Thomas Taggart bought the ruins, rebuilding on a grander scale with a dedicated rail spur running trains directly from Chicago to the hotel’s front door. Illegal casino gambling flourished alongside the legitimate spa business through the early 20th century, drawing politicians, gangsters, and entertainers to what had become, by the Roaring Twenties, a valley with thirty hotels and fifteen clubs. The resort relied heavily on Black laborers recruited from Kentucky throughout the Taggart era.