Sutherland Springs

Sutherland Springs was an outstanding early-day Southwest Texas health spa with twenty-seven flavors of mineral water from more than one hundred hot and cold springs, waters that Indians had used for healing before white settlement. The resort was founded in 1848 by Dr. John Sutherland, who had been at the Alamo when Santa Anna came on Feb. 23, 1836, but was sent out by Travis to summon aid. Sutherland built his plantation home on a bluff west of the Cibolo across from the wooded valley of springs, and patients boarded in his home, in neighbors' homes, or in rented cottages at the springs. Among the most common mineral waters were White Sulphur, Black Sulphur, and Hume Sour, and the hot springs were especially popular in treating rheumatic diseases. Sutherland Springs was also a stagecoach stop on the Old San Antonio Road. In 1854 Dr. Sutherland had a British teacher lay off the square and town as seen today, and in 1860, when Wilson County was created, it became the county seat. Reconstruction Judge Wm. Longsworth demanded $250 to keep the county seat there, and when he did not get it, he hauled the court records to Lodi and later to Floresville. In 1909, New Sutherland Springs, on lowland acres formerly held by Gideon Lee, had a fifty-two-room hotel, the largest concrete pool in the South, and church encampments, but floods in 1913 turned that resort into a ghost town.

Texas · United States