Chick Springs
| Chick Springs, | |
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| Mineral springs | |
The final Chick Springs Hotel, c. 1914.
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| Coordinates: 34°55.7′N 82°17.4′W / 34.9283°N 82.2900°WCoordinates: 34°55.7′N 82°17.4′W / 34.9283°N 82.2900°W | |
| Country | United States |
| State | South Carolina |
| County | Greenville |
Chick Springs is a mineral springs in present-day Taylors, Greenville County, South Carolina, which from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century served as the focus of a small Upstate South Carolina resort community.
The healing power of the mineral waters was known to Native Americans living near the Enoree River, and several early European visitors commented on them, including the architect Robert Mills, who in 1826 described the perfectly clear water as smelling strongly “like the washings of a gun barrel” and claimed it to be useful in “curing ring worms and other cutaneous disorders.”
In 1840, planter Burwell Chick opened a resort at the location, building a “large and commodious hotel.” He also allowed some individual "cottages" to be built on the property. After Chick’s death in 1847, the enterprise continued under two of his sons, Pettus and Reuben. By the 1850s, when the railroad had reached the Upstate, the resort attracted hundreds of visitors at a time and boosted the local economy, farmers “for ten and twenty miles around” finding a market for their livestock and produce.
A visiting Catholic priest found the resort “like all watering-places,” largely “patronized by those in quest of pleasure or matrimonial alliances.” A reporter in 1854 noted “the whole house busy” with “five or six tables of whist parties below the piazzas, two or three card tables employed in the drawing room, two pianos accompanied by sweet voices, one billiard table, at which the balls were constantly cracking, a nine-pin alley, and a great many outsiders and lookers on busily engaged in smoking their cigars. Some were walking to the spring, and at the spring house some were pitching quoits for exercise after drinking the sulphur and chalybeate water.” The reporter further noted the dissection of a fresh watermelon and evening dances that often lasted until midnight.
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Wikipedia