West Warm Springs was settled in the 1870s by Black residents who bought land on the west side of Little Mountain, forming a distinct community connected by road to the pools and sustained by work at the resort hotel and bath houses as well as by independent craftsmen and skilled laborers. By 1890, it had about 20 houses, arranged in small family groupings along winding neighborhood roads on the slopes and terraces of the foothills, a pattern shaped by the hilly terrain that largely remains even though many early homes have been replaced. Descendants of the founding families still live there and have helped preserve its history. Two historic churches, John Wesley Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1873, and Mount Pisgah Baptist Church, founded in 1876, remain from the community’s first decades. The original Mount Pisgah log church was later used as a school for Black students called the Jones School after James William Jones, who donated the land, and children attended it into the 1930s until the Union Hurst School was built near Hot Springs in 1925 with help from the Rosenwald School Building Fund. Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck, and Company, created that fund to aid southern communities in building schools for Black students during racial segregation, influenced by the educational work of Booker T. Washington. Another Rosenwald school, the T.C. Walker School, was built near Millboro in 1929, and both schools closed in 1965 when Bath County integrated its schools. West Warm Springs also included homes such as the early log house of Mac Church and the nearby Jones House, neither of which survives, and commercial buildings such as Webb’s Store, an early-20th-century country store that became a trusted business and important gathering place for Black residents. West Warm Springs stands as an important reminder of the strength and persistence of Black citizens in the years after the Civil War, creating a community that was both separate from Warm Springs and part of it.