Hot Wells (San Antonio, Texas)

Hot Wells was from 1894 to the early 1920s, a spa, hotel, bathhouse, and health resort along the San Antonio River in the southside of San Antonio, Texas. Plans are underway in 2015 to restore Hot Wells to the glamour of its heyday, when international visitors included U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt and Porfirio Diaz, a president of Mexico.

A sulfur-laden artesian spring was found on the site in 1892. Two years later, a bathhouse and hotel followed under the direction of developer McClellan Shacklett. Hot Wells claimed its waters would benefit persons with diseases of the skin, liver, and kidney as well as those with rheumatism and even sepsis. Not long after the facility opened, fire destroyed the resort in December 1894, but Shacklett was financially unable to rebuild. Instead, a German immigrant Otto Koehler of Pearl Brewing Company, purchased the property and re-opened it in 1902 as a three-story brick building with eighty rooms. In the octagonal bathhouse, there were forty-five private baths in three pools. Koehler brought ostriches to the resort to provide guests with ostrich races. There were also domino parties, concerts, and lectures. Streetcars brought guests from downtown San Antonio. At its peak, Hot Wells was likened to other such resorts in Karlsbad, Germany and in Hot Springs, Arkansas. In 1906, the Cincinnati Reds baseball team conducted its training camp there. A 1911 silent picture, The Fall of the Alamo, was filmed there. The resort attracted such celebrities as film director Cecil B. DeMille and actors Sarah Bernhardt, Tom Mix, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Rudolph Valentino. Some celebrities came to Hot Wells in their own rail cars on a spur which served the resort.

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