Berkeley Springs State Park, now a 4.5-acre public park, has always been public ground. Native tribes were known to use the springs but none lived there permanently. Thomas Lord Fairfax allowed public use in colonial times, and when the town was established in 1776, the land around the springs was reserved for public use as Bath Square under trustees. In the 19th century it was known as the Grove, where large oaks framed the Promenade beside the springs. The state controlled the area for much of the 20th century, and it became Berkeley Springs State Park in 1970 before later being listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Its buildings and monuments reflect the long practice of “taking the waters” and changing ways of doing so over time. Warm Springs Run joins the springs overflow under Fairfax Street and flows north through town to the Potomac River. After 1784 a Gentlemen's Bath House was built on the site of today's Roman Baths, and local legend credits James Rumsey with the design; the present two-story brick building dates to about 1815 and has housed the Museum of Berkeley Springs on its second floor since 1984. The Gentlemen's Spring House over the main drinking spring may date to 1816, though an 1853 account already matches the present structure, and a public drinking spring or fountain has stood there since 1787 with free water guaranteed by the 1776 Virginia law establishing the town. Several springs rise south of the drinking spring and fill stone pools and a spillway, forming the largest public display of water among the springs along the Blue Ridge. The public swimming pool, built in 1951, stands where covered bathing pools had existed in the previous two centuries; before it, a 150-foot-long Victorian pool building designed by Henry Harrison Hunter in 1887 held separate pools for men and women until its demolition in 1948. George Washington's Bathtub is a modern stone reconstruction of the primitive bathing conditions before 1784, when Washington and many other summer visitors soaked in spring-fed pools hollowed from the sandy hillside. The enclosed spring there is the highest in the park. Lord Fairfax's spring, set among rocks at the southernmost pool, was once covered by a rough shanty said to have been built by Fairfax for his own use, and it later supplied a series of bath houses and now the outdoor pool. The yellow brick Main Bathhouse at the park's south end was built in 1929 on land added after the Berkeley Hotel burned in 1898, and massages have been offered there since at least 1932. On the eastern side of the run, the gazebo was dedicated in 1931, while a small brick building converted in 1930 to rest rooms and an office had earlier been a frame structure described in 1787 as a Poor People's Bath and was also attributed to James Rumsey. George Washington recorded visiting the Warm Springs on March 18, 1748, and camping in a nearby field that night.
