43 Fun Facts About Hot Springs National Park

Hot Springs National Park is in which US state?

Arkansas was still a territory when its legislature asked Congress, in 1820, to set the springs aside for public use; Congress acted twelve years later.

Which president signed the 1832 law protecting Hot Springs?

Andrew Jackson signed it on April 20, 1832, but Congress gave no one the job of managing the land, so settlers went on building businesses right over the springs.

Before becoming a national park in 1921, Hot Springs was a federal what?

Reservation: in 1832 Congress 'reserved' four sections of land around the springs for the United States, and the word stuck as the site's name for 89 years.

Until Gateway Arch was redesignated in 2018, Hot Springs held what distinction among national parks?

Smallest by area: the park guards only the springs and the wooded slopes that feed them, about 5,500 acres pressed against a city, yet the St. Louis arch grounds are smaller still.

Why did Hot Springs get the first America the Beautiful quarter in 2010?

It was set aside earliest: the Mint issued the coins in the order their sites first gained federal protection, and the springs' 1832 law is four decades older than Yellowstone.

Hot Springs Mountain rises south of the Ozarks, in which separate range?

The Ouachita Mountains were buckled into tight folds when tectonic plates collided, and the cracks left behind are the channels the spring water travels through.

Which rock, quarried on the ridges around Hot Springs for thousands of years, is prized for sharpening knives?

Novaculite, a dense rock of tiny quartz crystals, drew American Indians to these ridges for tool and weapon stone, and it is still cut into whetstones today.

Where does the heat in Hot Springs' thermal water come from?

Rocks warming naturally with depth do the work: rain sinks more than 4,500 feet, heats up, then rises fast along faults to emerge at about 143 °F, with chemistry showing it never neared magma.

Radiocarbon dating shows that Hot Springs' thermal water fell as rain roughly how long ago?

4,400 years is the water's carbon-dated age, so what emerges today fell as rain around the time Egypt's pyramids were going up, then spent millennia creeping down through rock.

What is the display spring that spills down a bluff on Arlington Lawn called?

The Hot Water Cascade lets thermal water run in the open, a rarity here because the springs themselves were walled up and covered by 1901 to protect them.

By tradition, what did Native American tribes call the site of today's Hot Springs?

Valley of the Vapors is the name tradition hands down, along with a legend that even warring tribes laid down their weapons there to share the springs in peace.

After ceding the springs by treaty in 1818, the Quapaw were removed in the 1830s to where?

Indian Territory, in today's northeastern Oklahoma, was their assigned home under an 1833 treaty, after a first forced move to the Red River ended in floods and hunger that drove them back.

Which president sent William Dunbar and George Hunter to explore the springs in 1804?

Thomas Jefferson wanted his newly bought western lands explored, so the pair reached the springs in December 1804 and spent a month measuring the water's heat and noting empty cabins.

The Maurice Bathhouse's 1931 therapy pool was built to treat what?

Paralysis: the Maurice, one of the row's eight bathhouses, added the pool, inspired by the treatments Franklin D. Roosevelt received at Warm Springs, Georgia.

Which bathhouse reopened as Hot Springs National Park's visitor center in 1989?

The Fordyce was the first bathhouse on the row to go out of business, in 1962, and citizens campaigning to save the vacant buildings made rescuing it their priority.

As of 2025, which two Bathhouse Row buildings still operate as bathhouses?

Buckstaff and Quapaw: the Buckstaff has never stopped running baths since 1912, while the Quapaw sat vacant from 1984 until it was leased out and reopened as a family spa in 2008.

The colonel who built Bathhouse Row's costliest bathhouse in 1915 had made his fortune in which industry?

Railroads made him rich, and he spent more than $212,000 on the bathhouse as a monument to the waters he believed had restored his health after his Civil War service.

Besides baths, the row's grandest bathhouse offered its patrons which recreational facilities?

Bowling lanes and a billiard room: the two basement lanes were the only ones on the row, part of the luxury that drew its wealthier clientele.

The Superior, the northernmost bathhouse, reopened in the 2010s as what?

A brewery and restaurant moved into the Superior, once the smallest and cheapest house on the row, and it makes its beer with the park's thermal spring water.

The Quapaw bathhouse, built in 1922, is topped by what distinctive feature?

A dome of coloured tiles crowns a building that sprawls across the footprint of two earlier bathhouses, the Horseshoe and the Magnesia, which its owners replaced with one.

Bathhouse Row's Hale, rebuilt in 1892-93, opened in 2019 as what?

A nine-room hotel opened in the row's oldest surviving bathhouse, which had stood mostly empty since a 1981 bid to run it as a theatre and arcade folded within nine months.

After its bathing days ended in 1977, Bathhouse Row's Ozark reopened in the 2010s as what?

An arts and events center, the park's Cultural Center, filled the Ozark with galleries where artists from the park's residency programme hung their work.

Bathhouse Row was designated what in 1987?

National Historic Landmark status saved the buildings but not their trade: it came two years after another closure had left just one bathhouse on the row still giving baths.

The brick-paved walkway on the hillside behind Bathhouse Row is called what?

The Grand Promenade took decades to finish after grading began in 1933, and a whole bathhouse, the Imperial, was razed to make way for its entrance.

What did the government do to Hot Springs Creek in the 1880s?

Buried it in a stone arch tunnel: bathers had crossed the open creek on narrow bridges, and covering it cut contamination and made room for today's Central Avenue above.

Congress opened a free Hot Springs bathhouse in 1878 for which bathers?

The poor were promised free baths by Congress, and when demand dwindled in the 1950s the government closed the free house and paid commercial bathhouses to treat them instead.

Which federal department ran the Army and Navy General Hospital behind Bathhouse Row?

The War Department opened it in 1887, and the military kept it until 1960, when it passed to the state and spent six decades as a rehabilitation centre and career school.

Which gangster famously favoured the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs?

Al Capone regularly booked the Arlington's whole fourth floor for himself and his men, drawn like other mobsters to a town where illegal casinos ran in the open.

Hot Springs is often called the birthplace of what baseball tradition?

Spring training is traced to 1886, when one big-league club's president sent his players here to get fit in warm weather and take the baths; after their winning year, other clubs followed.

The Chicago club that first brought big-league baseball to Hot Springs in 1886 is which team today?

The Chicago Cubs, then called the White Stockings, came under player-manager Cap Anson; the White Sox name belongs to a separate American League club founded in 1901.

Which Red Sox pitcher, filling in at first base, hit a 1918 home run into a Hot Springs alligator farm?

Babe Ruth's drive flew an estimated 573 feet into a pond at the farm across the street, and the Red Sox soon had their young pitcher playing the field more often.

Which US president grew up in Hot Springs?

Bill Clinton moved from Hope as a boy when his mother married a Hot Springs car dealer, and at Hot Springs High he weighed a career in music before choosing politics.

What was the first observation tower on Hot Springs Mountain, built in 1877, made of?

Wood: the 1877 observatory gave way in 1906 to a steel tower with an elevator, and today's 216-foot tower, opened in 1983, is the third on the summit.

In 1862, with Union troops threatening Little Rock, the governor briefly made Hot Springs what?

The state capital: Governor Henry Rector, who had long pressed his family's claim to own the springs, moved the state records there, and the town held the title from May 6, 1862, until that July.

Gulpha Gorge is where Hot Springs National Park keeps its what?

Campground: tents and RVs share the creekside sites at Gulpha Gorge, and campers can walk straight onto the trails that climb Hot Springs Mountain.

Which trees dominate Hot Springs National Park's never-logged old-growth stands?

Shortleaf pine and oak cover slopes believed never to have been logged, though the park they stand in reaches into the middle of a city.

Which flowering trees line the sidewalk in front of Bathhouse Row?

Magnolias were planted in double rows along the front of the bathhouses in the 1890s, under an Army officer sent to beautify the spa; a single row still shades the walk.

Which Spanish explorer, in a legend historians now doubt, visited Hot Springs in 1541?

Hernando de Soto's supposed visit so charmed the row's builders that one bathhouse got a fountain statue of him, though most historians now discredit the story.

Bathhouse Row's Lamar honours Lucius Lamar, 1880s head of which federal department?

Interior: Lucius Lamar ran the department that oversaw the springs; the bathhouse bearing his name today, finished in 1923, was the last one built on the row.

What opened Hot Springs' whites-only bathhouses to Black bathers, who had relied on houses like the Pythian?

1960s civil rights law ended the separate system in 1965; until then the Black attendants who staffed the row's bathhouses could work in them but not bathe there.

Horse racing in the city of Hot Springs takes place at which track?

Oaklawn Park's signature spring race is a proving ground for the Kentucky Derby: American Pharoah won it in 2015 on his way to the Triple Crown.

Under the Köppen system, what climate type does Hot Springs National Park have?

Humid subtropical means hot, muggy summers and no dry season, and the rain can be violent: a 1923 storm sent floodwater surging down Central Avenue past the bathhouses.

Which people lived around Hot Springs before the Choctaw and other displaced tribes arrived?

The Caddo were so weakened by European epidemics that the survivors moved south to join kin along the Red River, leaving the land to newcomers.