Tallapoosa’s hotel above the quiet springs

Beside a dead tree, a thick curved rim surrounds a dark opening in the ground. Flat stones are stacked into the bank behind it. Leaves cover the slope, and beyond the trees the hillside opens into grass.

There is little in that quiet scene to suggest a sprawling hotel with towers, broad porches and a ballroom. Yet the Lithia Springs Hotel once stood uphill in Tallapoosa, and the remains below its former site are where this investigation has taken us.

The surprise comes in two stages: that such a building existed here at all, and that part of its story may still be visible in the landscape. This is a walk between those two discoveries—from the hotel preserved in pictures to the stonework still tucked into the hillside. The photographs show what Daniel found; the imagined scenes help us picture a visit without claiming that every detail is known.

The setting is Tallapoosa in Haralson County. Its Lithia Springs Hotel was separate from the resorts around the community of Lithia Springs in Douglas County.

A building big enough to stop you

The historical photograph displayed at the site gives the hotel its scale: long wings, shaded verandas, pointed roofs and a tall, tiered observation tower. Even before reading the caption, you can see that this was a substantial undertaking.

A preservation history prepared for the North Tallapoosa Residential Historic District places the start of hotel operations in 1892. It describes 175 rooms, a ballroom, a banquet hall and other gathering spaces. The adjoining park contained a summerhouse and four mineral springs; guests also had tennis, bowling and riding trails. The hotel belonged to a larger effort to attract both visitors and investment to Tallapoosa. [1]

Its size and elaborate silhouette made it a landmark. The photograph helps explain why the hotel has remained part of local memory long after its removal.

The museum makes it real

At the West Georgia Museum of Tallapoosa, a scale model gives that vanished building a second presence. A model can make something an old photograph leaves difficult to grasp—the sheer length of the building, the arrangement of its porches, and the way its towers rose above them. The museum brochure Daniel brought back includes a photograph of that model.

There is a story behind that model, too. Bud Jones, whose work helped preserve local history through the museum, described the project in a recorded 2019 University of West Georgia interview. He recalled that original hotel plans had been found and that a local contractor helped translate them into the museum’s reconstruction. The drawings themselves have not been examined for this article, but Jones’s account gives us a specific lead to follow. [2]

Jones also remembered people seeing the exhibit and discovering, sometimes for the first time, that Tallapoosa had possessed such a hotel. That is exactly why the model matters. A building that has vanished from the skyline can still change the way someone sees their hometown. [2]

The springs were part of the promise

To understand the hotel, it helps to understand what the springs offered visitors. This was being promoted as a place for a health-minded stay: mineral water, a favorable climate and time away, together with the comforts and social life of a resort. A guest could be interested in the water and also enjoy the grounds, recreation and company. The surviving accounts show that health hopes were part of the appeal; they do not establish that the water cured illness. [1] [4]

The water also presented a business opportunity. If visitors valued it at the spring, promoters hoped customers elsewhere would value it in bottles. In June 1891, a Georgia-Alabama Investment and Development Company advertisement proposed bottling Lithia and Chalybeate waters from Lithia Springs Park for distribution across the United States. It named City Bottling Works of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, among ventures building or contracted to locate in Tallapoosa. [3]

“Lithia” and “Chalybeate” are the names used for the waters in those historical accounts. The advertisement records an ambition to sell them far beyond Tallapoosa. It does not tell us which surviving enclosure, if any, was used in that business. Production records and a plant plan would help establish how much of the proposal was realized.

A different contemporary voice appears in an 1896 letter by E. H. Holbrook, M.D., published in The Homoeopathic Physician. He encouraged interest in Tallapoosa as a health resort and distinguished the Lithia Springs Hotel north of town from another hotel near the depot. His emphasis on climate shows that the sales pitch extended beyond a drink of water: visitors were being invited to spend a season in Tallapoosa, and perhaps stay. [4]

In a letter published in The Sunflower on January 1, 1901, Mrs. Nellie Warren described the Lithia and Chalybeate spring as “free to all” and an attraction for visitors. That small phrase suggests that the attraction extended beyond the hotel’s paying guests. It describes access at that time, not permission to enter the property today. [10]

Imagine the walk down

Imagine a visitor leaving the hotel’s shaded porch and walking toward the springs below. The descent would change the experience: the large building behind, the hollow ahead, and a stop by the water before the return uphill. Our drawing explores what such a visit might have felt like, using the present stonework as its starting point.

The spring scene imagines an afternoon around 1895. Clothing and a portable drinking vessel follow period references; the people, the path and the act of collecting water at this particular opening are interpretive additions.

The imagined visit gives the tree a living canopy and places a visitor at the rim with a metal cup and a stoneware jug. The scene asks a question the remains cannot yet answer: could this have been a place where someone stopped to collect water? Its proposed use and the tree’s presence in the hotel years remain unverified.

Below the hotel, another kind of record

Walking the hollow today means looking for small, deliberate shapes among leaves and roots. A retaining wall is a wall built to hold back higher ground; here, stacked stones mark the edge of a shelf in the hillside. Below and around it are other remains: rectangular concrete enclosures, curved masonry rims and pipework. Together they show that people put substantial work into shaping this place, although the works may not all date to the hotel years.

The most distinctive group is easy to recognize across several photographs. A broken dead trunk stands almost within the retaining-wall line. Immediately beside it is the deep opening with the thick curved rim. The wall extends along the bank, holding higher ground behind it. The wider views matter as much as the close-ups: they show that the opening, trunk and wall belong to one closely connected group.

Other views show substantial rectangular walls with leaves filling their interiors. A pipe passes through one enclosure. Such details make water-related uses worth investigating, but a pipe does not, by itself, identify a swimming pool, bath or bottling tank. Nor does a rectangular outline prove that a building stood on it.

The easiest way to follow Daniel’s recollection is to stand, in your imagination, near the former hotel and look downhill. First comes the large rectangular enclosure in the field, with its long dimension running toward and away from the hotel. Farther down is the shelf held by the stone wall, with the broken tree almost part of its edge. The small curved-rim opening sits below that shelf and faces downhill, so someone above it would have difficulty seeing inside.

Continue roughly fifty or sixty feet downhill, by Daniel’s estimate, and the ground becomes flatter. Here he recalls a larger, complete circular enclosure. A smaller rectangular enclosure sits off to the right near another spring, with a reported pipe route toward the circle. These names—rectangle, opening and circle—describe the shapes we can discuss without pretending we already know each structure’s purpose.

These are recollected relationships and approximate distances to test on the ground. The slope leads into a flatter bottom with a slow stream; the surviving works may belong to more than one period.

Step inside, for a moment

The hotel was also somewhere to sit, talk, read and pass the time between outings. To evoke that part of a stay, we have added an imagined parlor: guests gathered near the windows, a newspaper, a piano and an open doorway onto the veranda.

The parlor is a period impression, since no authenticated photograph or measured plan of this room has been located. Sanborn fire-insurance maps—maps made to document buildings and their construction and services—do record electric lighting at the hotel. [14]

An interior photograph, inventory or surviving plan could make that view much more exact. A local walking-tour account mentions copper roofing, while a homeowner’s account, described below, points to possible marble salvage. Neither tells us how a particular room was furnished.

A hotel with more than one ending

The building’s later life adds an unexpected human chapter. Kate Smith’s feature, reprinted in the Jackson Herald in July 1941, described Dr. and Mrs. E. L. Gilmore and Mrs. Gilmore’s sister, Minnie Sleeper, living in the former hotel. The household occupied only part of the enormous building and guarded against fire. Visitors became enough of a burden that a sign asked sightseers to leave them some privacy. [5]

Smith reported that the Gilmores had visited Tallapoosa on their honeymoon and later returned to make the hotel their home. The picture is striking: a building intended to receive crowds had become a household that sometimes needed fewer callers.

Its final disappearance belongs to the early 1940s. The National Register history and a Georgia Archives catalog note give 1943; a local walking-tour account gives 1942. The precise dismantling year remains unresolved. The preservation history also records reputed reuse of hotel lumber in local houses. Dismantling could therefore mean more than the loss of a building: useful pieces could leave the site and become part of another home. [1] [6] [7]

A possible piece beneath a neighbor’s feet

One of Daniel’s conversations suggests another way the building may have survived. A homeowner surnamed Worthy, across the road from the former hotel, told him that marble recovered during its dismantling had been reused for walkways while the house was being built. Daniel noticed pieces with curved, scalloped shaping. If the account can be confirmed, something once fitted into the resort may now be part of an ordinary walk to a neighbor’s house.

That is a valuable local account, relayed here as oral history. We have not established the pieces’ original position in the hotel, the construction date of the house or the full chain of ownership. A walkway photograph, a family note or a building-era record could make the connection much firmer.

Another reported lead—that a hotel owner also owned a concrete-block plant—remains unresolved. Distinctive blocks deserve comparison with old photographs, but resemblance alone cannot identify their maker.

The photograph we still need

The missing view is the one a hotel guest might have seen from above: the park spread out below the building. A catalog of historic Tallapoosa photographs in the Smithsonian’s H. H. French collection lists a promising image captioned Lithia Springs Park. From Hotel Site. It is Box 1, item 7. We have read the finding aid, not obtained the print. [8]

It could help answer the question the field photographs leave open: how did people move between the hotel, the slopes and the springs? A visible wall, path or shelter might connect the historical park to a recognizable feature today. It might also show us where our working picture is wrong.

The museum model gives the hotel its height again. Down in the hollow, the stonework gives the search a place to begin. Between them is room for a family photograph or a remembered story to make a connection we cannot yet see.

A dated photograph, a letter about a hotel dance, a bill for salvaged material or the name of someone who worked there could supply the next connection. The hotel has gone from the hill. The search for its story is still bringing people back to it.