West Baden Springs Hotel — spa town
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West Baden Springs Hotel

  • 2 min read
  • 38.567° N 86.618° W

Interesting facts

  • Major league teams including the Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati Reds and Pittsburgh Pirates held spring training on a lighted baseball diamond set inside the resort's cycling track.
  • The covered, double-decked oval cycling and pony track measured about 1,760 feet, reportedly the largest of its kind in the country.
  • Palm trees grew beneath the great dome and birds were allowed to fly freely around the atrium while guests lounged below.
  • The atrium fireplace was big enough to burn logs up to 14 feet (about 4 m) long.
  • The hotel had its own bank and stock brokerage, and when news of the 1929 crash arrived, guests crowded its offices and began leaving within hours.
  • During the 1917-19 refurbishment the building served as a U.S. Army hospital for soldiers wounded in the First World War.
  • Rival spas sold bottled mineral water with mascots: West Baden's Sprudel Water featured a gnome, while French Lick's Pluto Water used a red devil.
  • African-American hotel staff played on an early Negro league baseball team, the West Baden Sprudels, whose rivals were the French Lick Plutos.
  • During the Lillian Sinclair remodel, the atrium's brick support columns were wrapped in canvas and painted to look like marble.
  • Basketball star Larry Bird, born in West Baden, staged clinics and games in the domed atrium while the building was a college campus.

Why it is worth it

Under a dome 200 feet (61 m) across, the atrium of the six-storey West Baden Springs Hotel opens like a circus tent turned to steel and glass. When the hotel opened in 1902, this was the largest dome in the world, and it held that title until 1913; in the United States no free-spanning dome surpassed it until 1955. Rooms ring the atrium in two concentric circles, the inner ones looking down onto a floor of some two million small marble squares.

The site began as a mineral spring known as Mile Lick in the hills of southern Indiana. A physician, John A. Lane, opened a hotel there around 1852, and in 1855 the settlement was renamed West Baden after the German spa towns. Railways brought guests from across the country to take the waters, in fierce rivalry with the neighbouring French Lick resort. After the old wooden hotel burned in 1901, its owner Lee Wiley Sinclair resolved to replace it with a round, fireproof building under a great dome. Most builders said it could not be done; the West Virginia architect Harrison Albright designed it, and a crew of 500 finished it in 270 working days. Advertised as the "Eighth Wonder of the World", it offered a casino, an opera house, mineral baths and a covered two-deck cycling track. Paul Dresser wrote Indiana's state song here.

From 1917 Sinclair's daughter Lillian remodelled the interior in a Greco-Roman style, adding the marble mosaic floor, marble wainscoting and a fireplace faced with Rookwood Pottery tiles. The Depression emptied the hotel; it closed in 1932, and in 1934 it was given to the Jesuits, who turned it into a seminary, stripped its fittings and removed its four Moorish towers. A business college followed until 1983. Left derelict, the building partly collapsed in 1991 and was named one of America's most endangered places. Indiana Landmarks stabilised it, and since 2007 it has again been a hotel, seventy-five years after it first closed. It is a National Historic Landmark and a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark.

Getting there

The hotel stands in West Baden Springs, a short distance north of French Lick in Orange County, Indiana. The nearest city is Jasper, about 34 km away. The nearest airport is Louisville Muhammad Ali International (SDF), about 89 km away in a straight line.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in the United States 228The Most Beautiful Resorts 4

From the encyclopaedia

The West Baden Springs Hotel, formerly the West Baden Inn, is part of the French Lick Resort and is a national historic landmark hotel in West Baden Springs, Indiana. It has a 200-foot (61 m) dome over its atrium. Prior to the completion of the Coliseum in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1955, the dome was the largest free-spanning dome in the United States. From 1902 to 1913 it was the largest dome in the world. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974, the hotel became a National Historic Landmark in 1987. It is a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark and one of the hotels in the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Historic Hotels of America program.

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