Around 1860, H.G. Bang built Congress Hall as a magnificent hotel to rival the Pavilion Hotel and sulphur baths. Though not adjoined, it formed part of his beautiful park, Magnesia Temple, and bathhouses surrounding John Gardner's famous White Sulphur baths. Fire destroyed Congress Hall in 1875 along with the White Sulphur bathhouses, and Gardner reopened in 1876 with a more elegant ninety-two room bathhouse. As he continued developing the spa, Gardner built the Inhalation House in 1881, where patients inhaled sulphur vapors through a cup fitted over the face, a treatment reputed to help lung and bronchial ailments. Doctors prescribed regimented treatments specific to each patient's ailment, determining daily doses of sulphur in oral, topical, or vaporized forms. In the last four decades of the 1900's, the building served only as a spa-related doctor's office because inhalation treatments were no longer prescribed. In 1927, John's son Henry Gardner opened the Imperial Baths on the site of Congress Hall to attract a modern clientele. The Victorian era sulphur bathhouses remained in use just west of the new building, while the Imperial offered Nauheim baths, Scotch douches, mud packs, and massages. Heated water was piped into large lead tubs, and after a twenty-minute soak, bathers were wrapped in warm sheets and required to rest on a cot in an adjoining room. This method of treatment changed little throughout the 20th century. In the 1960's, one wing of the 1876 bathhouse was demolished, and by the last decades the remaining wing, no longer in use, was collapsing.