For more than 200 years, the area bordering the park and springs where the Country Inn stands has been the center of hospitality in Berkeley Springs. In September 1784, George Washington stayed at the Sign of the Liberty Pole and Flag just south of the present inn, where he met inventor and sawmill owner James Rumsey, who demonstrated his mechanical boat. One of the ten lots occupied by the Country Inn was owned by James Smith, a signer of the Declaration of Independence from Pennsylvania, and another by General Horatio Gates, who witnessed Rumsey's successful public steamboat trial in Shepherdstown in 1787. In the prosperous decades before the Civil War, the Strother family built the elaborate Berkeley Springs Hotel facing the park, and soon afterward President James K. Polk stayed there. When Confederate General Stonewall Jackson spent two days in January 1862 shelling Hancock, Maryland, he quartered his men and horses in the grand hotel, although the Strothers were well-known Union supporters. Famous for dress balls and band music, the Berkeley Springs Hotel remained a mainstay of the resort town until it burned in March 1898. After three decades of rumors and false starts by various investors, the local Harmison family built the current center section in 1933 as the Park View Inn, and its popularity led to the addition of two wings in 1937 and more famous guests. New owners in 1972 named it the Country Inn, a name the current owners restored. South of the inn, the small lodging place called Bath Cottage was built in the 1990s on the foundation of the cabin where nineteenth-century bathkeeper John Davis was born and lived, and behind the inn are two lots that once held prominent nineteenth-century cottages.
