Long hunters led by Elisha Walden first recorded the beautiful orchard of crab apple trees in 1763, and soon the long hunters' trail from Cumberland Gap to Crab Orchard carried a swelling tide of settlers. Long known as the "grand gateway to Kentucky," Crab Orchard became an important station, and some travelers on the Wilderness Road settled there, including Colonel William Whitley and his wife, Esther. Near Crab Orchard in 1794, Whitley completed Sportsman's Hill, the first brick house in Kentucky, now a State Historic Site, and at his estate he built the first circular race track in America on which races were run in a counter-clockwise direction. Crab Orchard's eight mineral springs became renowned for their medicinal properties, and as early as 1827 Jack David built "A House of Entertainment" to take advantage of them. About 1850, the elegant Crab Orchard Springs Hotel was built with accommodations for 700 guests, and at the height of its popularity in the late 1850s it received almost 500 guests daily, including John Hunt Morgan and his Lexington Rifles. Known nationwide as the "Saratoga of the South," Crab Orchard also lay on an important military route during the Civil War, when thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers passed through. In 1862 John Hunt Morgan raided the town and destroyed 120 Union supply wagons on the Somerset Road, and in 1863 the Union army built a supply depot there that helped support the important Knoxville Campaign after turning the Baptist Church building into a hospital.