Among the people who came to hunt the animal trails was Daniel Boone, who reportedly carved his name and the year 1775 into a beech tree in a nearby community.

"[6] Sometime in the 1830s, a farmer named Jesse Jones noticed red-colored sulphur water bubbling up from springs on his farm.

Bennett's hotel consisted of a row of log cabins flanking a central frame dining hall.

During this decade, New York businessman James F. O. Shaugnesy purchased the Red Boiling Springs tract and began development of the area as a resort.

[10] In 1889, the town first made the Nashville newspapers' front pages when former Tennessee Governor John C. Brown died of a hemorrhage at one of the hotels.

With the continued rise in the number of visitors, two local general store owners— Zack and Clay Cloyd— opened the Cloyd Hotel during this period.

During this same period, road improvements allowed the stagecoach lines to be replaced with automobile taxis, reducing the travel time from the railroad to just three hours.

The hotels all followed a similar design plan— two stories with elegant verandas spanning the facade and interiors containing large dining halls and 50 to 60 rooms (some later doubled or tripled their roomspace with annexes).

The hotel registers included the names of judges, lawyers, heads of business and industry, famous musicians and singers, and politicians, among them Jo Byrns; Al Gore, Sr.; Nathan Bachman;[15] Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who sent a beautiful French tapestry that hung in the main lobby of the Donoho Hotel; and most notably President Woodrow Wilson.

Although the Great Depression destroyed many Americans' disposable incomes and hence budget for travel, Red Boiling Springs still had large numbers of visitors.

[17] Some were named for the color they would turn a silver coin; two, dubbed "Red" and "Black", were from springs which were capped off and then piped throughout the town to a series of wells with manually operated pumps on both public and private property.

Along with iron and sulphur, Red and Black waters both contained relatively high amounts of calcium and magnesium.

The bathhouses followed the hydrotherapy regimen developed by John Harvey Kellogg at his Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, which was very popular at the time.

"[21] As the resort grew, it became the stopping point for minstrel shows, circuses and other entertainments to a far greater degree than typical for towns of its small size.

The town boasted a number of "diversions": bowling alleys, tennis courts, shuffle board, croquet, a ballroom, swimming pools, a small golf course, theatre, and an amusement park.

One was a general loss of confidence and interest in the purportedly curative powers of mineral waters by Americans as the 20th century progressed.

The area's general remoteness began to work against it; this was greatly aggravated by World War II and the resultant gasoline rationing.

Tourism focus shifted within Tennessee to more highly developed areas such as the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

[24] Overall, 15 businesses and 35 houses were either heavily damaged or destroyed, and a Trailways bus had been swept approximately 500 feet into a steel-concrete bridge.

In the years following this, several sites including a town park, a housing development, and a dam built to prevent another such flood from happening again were named in memory of the two sisters.

Many years later, Nashville Channel 4 WSMV meteorologist Nancy VanCamp and team produced a documentary that recounted the events and the family of the girls were interviewed.

[26] State and Federal grant money aided businesses, built watershed dams and help the townsfolk rebuild.

By the late 1970s the town began to revisit its history in earnest with an eye to marketing it a tourist destination again, if only on a small scale.

The hotel gained notoriety in the early half of the 2010s when it became the subject of the popular SyFy channel television program Ghost Hunters.

The first Saturday in June brings the Folk Medicine Festival back to the city parks along the banks of the Salt Lick Creek.

This event is held at The Palace Park starting at 10am until the Rubber Duckies are released to race down Salt Lick Creek at 2pm.

The event hosts musical entertainment, local vendors who offer: crafts, food, games & family fun, and the stars of the show The Rubber "Racing" Duckies.

It is a rural heritage celebration held just outside city limits on the Ritter Farm with demonstrations of "old time skills", i.e. blacksmith shop, grist mill, horse drawn equipment, quilting, candle making.