The French Lick and West Baden Resort offers visitors a chance to step back in time, and recently a crew uncovered a hidden gem that's now giving the community another glimpse into the past.
"We were working on the restoration of the Bowling and Billiard Pavilion in the sunken gardens area, and we needed some soil for that,” said Justin Harris, the Director of Facilities at the French Lick Resort.
But when crews started digging up soil on the West Baden grounds to use, they found something unusual underneath — the remnants of an old pathway.
Curious, Harris went up the chain of command for permission to keep digging.
"After hitting that, Justin came to me and said, ‘We hit this, what do you think it is?’” said Chuck Franz, the vice president of Cook Group, the resort’s parent company. “I took him to my office and showed him historic aerials and said, ‘If you'd like to uncover it, go for it,’ not knowing ever that they'd hit what they hit."
What they hit was the old Neptune Spring, which was built in 1892.
A spring is where water moving underground finds an opening to the surface. In early times, they could be the only source of fresh water a community had.
"In the early days this is a location where buffalo, deer, a lot of wildlife would gather, and they would lick the minerals from the ground specifically out of the water,” Harris said. “It became known as a place for good hunting grounds so the Native Americans would be in this area. Eventually there was a fort, a munitions dump here. So, people have been coming to this area because of the mineral water."
The spring was one of four mineral springs on the West Baden Hotel property. And people from around the country flocked to the area for its medicinal properties.
Old photographs show a 30-foot tall wooden structure surrounded the spring, which was topped off by a dome, giving travelers to the area a nice spot to stop and visit.
"It's just been a hot spot for people and animals for a long time and that's what attracted people into the area originally,” Harris said. “When Indiana became a state this portion of Orange County was the only portion of Orange County that wasn't sold at public auction. Surveyed off and sold and that's because the federal government wanted to mine the minerals from this area."
The Neptune Spring wasn't around for long, as it was no longer in use by the 1910's.
Most of the other springs on the property were capped, but to Harris's surprise the spring is still active.
"When we pulled the concrete out of the spring that was the path of least resistance,” he said. “It actually restored the flows back to the spring in the original location which was cool. It's the only active original spring to the West Baden property."
While Harris and his team hope they're able to restore the spring to its former glory, they have another issue to deal with — figuring out how the initial spring was able to drain.
"I don't know how they did it, but the original Sprudel House was an area that our guests could come to and sample the water from all of the springs,” he said. “So that water had to get pumped into that area into this Sprudel House for the sampling. I don't know how it works yet. It doesn't currently work but when we took some elevations it doesn't want to work by gravity into the creek."
Harris, who is also a licensed engineer, is currently working on the problem.
He's also trying to figure out how to go about restoring the spring while keeping the history intact.
"The people back in the 1800s were craftsmen, and they did a lot of work that was very difficult for us to replicate without getting too much technology involved, and you kind of lose the historic nature of what that was and the cost of doing that would be significant," Harris said.
There is no set time line for when the spring could be reconstructed, but Harris says doing so would probably costs tens of thousands of dollars.
"It's really a wonderful thing to be involved in this and to see a part of history come back to life,” Harris said. “I absolutely love the history of this area. I'm a native of French Lick. I've grown up on these grounds and all the various states that it's been in until the restoration and knowing of things and not knowing what remains. That was my childhood, and now I get to be a part of rediscovering what was here a hundred years ago. "
For folks at West Baden Springs Hotel, this discovery has breathed new interest in the area's past with hopes to further unveil what lies beneath.
