Hot Springs, Arkansas

Everything Hot Springs is known for

2 songs mention this city 1 artist from here

Music in Hot Springs

Songs About Hot Springs

32-20 Blues
Robert Johnson
50%
"All the doctors in Hot Springs sure can't help her none"
Have You Ever Been To Little Rock?
Johnny Cash
8%
"They got some hot spring water"

Artists From Hot Springs

B
Billy Bob Thornton
americana Pop: 65

Rivers & Roads in Song near Hot Springs

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Hot Springs.

Arkansas River 6 songs

History of Hot Springs

Bathhouse Row and the Gangster Truce RoadyGoat

Hot Springs sits in a Ouachita Mountains valley fed by some forty-seven thermal springs, water that fell as rain millennia ago, sank thousands of feet, got superheated, and now surfaces near 143 degrees. The federal government moved to protect those springs unusually early: Congress set aside Hot Springs Reservation in 1832, making it the oldest land in what became the National Park System, decades before Yellowstone, though it wasn't formally renamed Hot Springs National Park until 1921. By the late 1800s grand bathhouses lined Bathhouse Row downtown, and visitors came from everywhere to soak. The same easygoing, look-the-other-way town also became a famous gangster getaway in the 1920s and '30s, neutral ground where mobsters from Chicago and New York mixed at the baths and the racetrack. Al Capone reportedly favored Suite 443 at the Arlington Hotel and sometimes booked the whole fourth floor. Spa town and outlaw hideout, soaking side by side.

The Crystal That Keeps Your Watch on Time RoadyGoat

The hills near Hot Springs hide one of the world's great treasures of clear quartz crystal, and the town of Mount Ida just up the road calls itself the Quartz Crystal Capital of the World. Roughly ninety-nine percent of the quartz mined in the United States comes out of this corner of Arkansas, in veins that can run sixty feet wide. But quartz isn't just pretty. It's secretly an engineer. Quartz is piezoelectric, meaning squeeze it and it makes a tiny electric charge, and feed it electricity and it vibrates at a perfectly steady beat. That heartbeat is exactly what keeps a quartz watch ticking and what times the chips inside your phone and computer. So those glittering crystals coming out of the Arkansas ground are the same mineral keeping the modern world on schedule.

You're Drinking Bronze-Age Rain RoadyGoat

Fill a cup from a Hot Springs fountain and you're sipping rain that fell before the pyramids were finished. Park scientists carbon-dated this water, and the answer stunned them: most of it is about four thousand four hundred years old. Here's the journey it took. Rain soaked into the Ouachita Mountains during the Bronze Age, then trickled down through cracks in the rock, one painfully slow inch at a time, sinking more than a mile underground. Down there the Earth's heat cooked it to a scald. Then, under pressure, it raced back to the surface in a fraction of the time it took to go down. So the water steaming out today began its trip when wooly mammoths were barely gone and Stonehenge was brand new. It's the oldest thing you'll ever taste.

Bathhouse Row

1832

Eight ornate bathhouses along Central Avenue in Hot Springs, built between 1892 and 1923, forming the centerpiece of the oldest federal reserve in the United States.

Everything Near Hot Springs

27 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

Explore Hot Springs on the Map
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