The First Resort

When Jackson Springs Was the Place to Be

By Maggie Beamguard

Insider Editor

Moss-covered steps peek from beneath layers of leaves, pine needles, humus and the annals of time. Over a century ago, elegant women and nattily dressed men sauntered up the flights to take lodging atop the hill at a Georgian-style hotel, and dine on quail in the linen-cloaked dining room.

Guests streamed down the same numerous shallow steps — breathing in the fresh pine vapors — to drink a healing mineral tonic and dance in the pavilion standing above the natural fount of Jackson Springs.

Here in the present, Judy Burroughs, lifelong resident and retired Moore County schoolteacher, finds a treacherous foothold at the base of that staircase, resolute in its inexorable return to the Earth. She casts an imaginative eye upward where the resort of fat pine wood once stood. Built in 1890, the hotel originally had between 36 and 72 bedrooms (records seem to vary) and modern conveniences like electric lights and steam heat.

“To tell the truth,” wrote Bion H. Butler in The Moore County News on July 5, 1923, “it was as a summer resort that the county achieved its first reputation, for long before J.T. Patrick had put Southern Pines into print, or before James Tufts had dreamed his dream of Pinehurst, Jackson Springs had been drawing a patronage through the efficacy of its healing waters.”

The spring still flows, now encased in a protective metal box. But gone is the hotel and its supporting infrastructure: the bowling alley, tennis courts, swimming pool, pagoda, picnic grove, bottling house, doctor’s office, bank and train tracks.

What remains is a restored train depot. And those stairs. 

Visitors have long sought — or been sold — the convalescent qualities of Moore County. In their pursuit for rest and recuperation, these weary travelers from the Northeast and Midwest found what they believed to be a magical healing majesty in the fragrant, abundant Longleaf Pine forests. You still see it today at the nearby Pinehurst Resort, though now the focus is the recreation of golf and other leisurely pursuits.

But before Pinehurst was Pinehurst — before Moore County became the home of American golf — folks came to the brand new health resort at Jackson Springs, Moore County’s premier attraction.

Memories of Memories

Burroughs, steadying herself on ancient foundations, tells memories of the hotel’s heyday. They aren’t her memories, but rather an inheritance from her mother, Nancy Ray Currie Blue (1924-2017). The arrival of visitors from far-off environs at the train depot provided thrilling entertainment for Blue and her sister, Sarah Currie Thompson (1922-2015). 

Grainy pictures and postcards hint at the grandeur the Currie sisters witnessed. Ladies clutching parasols don straw boat hats atop stylish pompadours. Structured Edwardian styles give way to looser lines, higher hems and shorter sleeves of light-colored frocks. Looking cool and dapper in three-piece summer suits, men stand casually with hands on hips within the striking pagoda. 

Summer evenings, the air would fill with ragtime music and promenades from the pavilion where fancily dressed people — “the men in tuxedoes and the ladies in lovely flowering dresses” — gathered to waltz, said Blue.

The resort welcomed the Uriel Davis Orchestra for the summer season of 1920. Davis earned recognition for composing “The Horse Trot” complete with jaunty dance instructions. 

While the Currie girls wouldn’t be born for a few years yet, similar musical stylings undoubtedly had toes tapping on sublime summer evenings.

The sisters observed the comings and goings of the fancy people from a hilltop perch in the shadow of the Jackson Springs Presbyterian Church across from the hotel. They held a front row seat to the bubbling curiosities and amusements of the Roaring ’20s.

One daring form of recreation involved a greasy pole, Nancy Blue recounts in a recording that Burroughs made in 1987. Blue was speaking to Burroughs’ second-graders on a field trip to the spring.

“A log was stripped of its bark and greased with lard. Then a watch or some such prize was put at the top. It was very hard to climb, but many boys and young men tried.” Many also likely incurred injury in the trying. 

But at least healing water abundantly flowed. 

“Jackson Springs is, first of all, a health resort,” declared a full-page Sunday advertisement in the Aug. 31, 1902 News & Observer. Touting the healing properties of the water, developers sought to attract visitors to the serene landscape to heal their ills.

Mineral springs — from Saratoga, New York, to Hot Springs, Arkansas — were all the rage at the turn of the 20th century. They were believed to have curative powers for people suffering such ailments as consumption (tuberculosis), asthma, dropsy, kidney and digestive issues. 

Another Jackson Springs ad boasts: “Running far back beyond the memory of the earliest settlers of Moore County, North Carolina, there has bubbled forth from a solid rock-bed some sparkling springs, the flow of which forms a little rivulet of clear, cold, effervescing water, carrying in its liquid depths many of Nature’s remedial and curative qualities. These have long been known to the neighborhood as Jackson Springs.” 

The marketing of the water was a new tactic for the business-minded trying to bottle the lore of an ancient elixir. 

Native American relics — arrowheads, vessels and tools likely left behind by Siouan-speaking Saura (Cheraw) who inhabited the Sandhills as early as 400 AD — indicate these early residents were the first to quench their thirst at the springs. But it would be the Highland Scots who would next slake their whistles there.

Settling Down

The settlers came up the Cape Fear River around 1750. Three were grandsons of a Scottish piper named Daniel Patterson. One of those grandsons, Duncan Patterson, received from King George II a grant of land near Jackson Springs.

The cemetery of the Jackson Springs Presbyterian Church, founded in 1817, bears the names of the many Scottish clans who settled the area: Currie, McInnis, Clark, MacKenzie and McDonald among them. 

No origin story is complete without a little folklore. The spring is said to have been named for Samuel Jackson, an Irish Quaker immigrant. According to the legend, as told by Blue to those second-graders, in the mid-1700s, a man named Jackson wounded a deer while hunting one day. He tracked the trail of blood in the snow to the spring, where he found the deer dead.

“There was a huge bed of brown rock with a natural bowl or basin in it and clear, sparkling water running free. Jackson received a grant for the land and called it Mineral Springs, Jackson’s Spring and then Jackson Springs,” she said. A second spring was discovered later, necessitating a language shift.

“After his death, his widow sold it to another man, named Col. William Jackson, and he and two others in his family are buried on the land just off the road leading to Foxfire from Jackson Springs.”

Samuel Jackson might be known more for who he was related to. He was uncle to Andrew Jackson, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans and the ninth president of the United States. 

For the next 100 years or so, settlers quietly established themselves in Jackson Springs, harvesting pine, planting peach orchards and tobacco, building schools, establishing places of worship and learning the land. 

The area grew in popularity in the surrounding counties, and people would come to camp in the area. In the late 1800s, tents and cottages popped up, and boarders, often wealthy cotton growers, were taken in for restorative stays.

Springing Into a New Century

The local popularity of the refreshing spring seems to have inspired a group of residents and investors in the late 1800s to share the secret utopia with the wider world. 

Allison Francis (Frank) Page, an industrialist fleeing debts in Wake County and a frequent visitor to Jackson Springs, moved his family to the Sandhills in 1879.

Page, John Blue and John Currie saw the potential of Jackson Springs. According to an advertisement placed in the Daily State Chronicle, June 9, 1891, “The gentlemen sought for and obtained an option upon the Springs and some 700 acres of long-leaf pine and deep sandy land surrounding it.” 

Around 1900, the Page lumber interests positioned them to build a 4-mile spur line on the Aberdeen and West End Railroad. Page founded and built the Jackson Springs Railroad, later selling it to the Norfolk-Southern Railroad in 1915. 

The locomotive backed into the Jackson Springs Depot along the creek for the spring — close enough that travelers could nearly jump into the waters from the cars, though there is no evidence anyone tried.

Business boomed. During the resort’s most bustling seasons, six trains ran daily to Jackson Springs, carrying eager passengers, mail, turpentine, lumber, mineral water and peaches.

The Campbells of Aberdeen built the original Jackson Springs Hotel. By 1933, the resort had welcomed thousands of visitors, changed ownership several times, and been remodeled and expanded to 120 rooms. 

Other businesses thrived in the tourist economy, including the Jackson Springs Sanitarium, opened by Dr. A.A. McDonald in 1904. There was a savings and loan, the Sandhill Drugstore, a department store, a hardware, cotton gin and dry goods store.

As for the specialness of that local spring water? Samples from Jackson Springs were submitted for competition in the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

Success. The North Carolina spring water received a silver medal for the second best natural medicinal water in America, sliding in behind the waters of Iuka, Mississippi. Jackson Springs was on the map, gaining recognition around the globe.

From left, a postcard showing the train depot; the Jackson Springs train depot as it stands today. HISTORICAL PHOTO COURTESY OF MOORE COUNTY HISTORICAL ARCHIVES, CURRENT PHOTO TED FITZGERALD / Seven Lakes Insider

The Pinehurst Effect

For many years, Pinehurst and Jackson Springs enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. According to a note by Leonard Tufts, great-grandson of James Walker Tufts, “Some early Pinehurst advertising touted the value of the mineral waters of nearby Jackson Springs, and visitors were encouraged to enjoy a pleasant drive to the nearby resort.”

Several of Pinehurst’s more famous guests embraced the advice. Annie Oakley, a real fixture of the Pinehurst Gun Club; composer and Marine Corps Band conductor John Philip Sousa; and former N.C. Gov, Charles B. Aycock are said to have been among the visitors to taste the Jackson Springs goodness.

The one-two pairing had a Sandhills symbiosis for the local economy. Pinehurst hotels opened for fall, winter and spring. Combined with Jackson Springs’ summer season, there was an opportunity to keep staff employed year-round.

But Jackson Springs would ultimately be eclipsed, absorbed and then sold off by its younger partner. Tufts purchased the resort from original owners Currie, Blue and R.R. Ross in 1913. He then sold it to Henry A. Page in 1923.

The crystal ball of the Moore County News looked favorably upon the Jackson Springs resort at the start of the Roaring ’20s: “Right now three or four of the biggest enterprises of the State are in the course of development in the region immediately about Jackson Springs, and in the next half dozen years, is destined to behold one of the most marvelous transitions ever seen in the South.”

Bragged the paper on May 13, 1920: “Now Wall Street is talking about Moore County and of Sandhills investments, and making them in a way that at any previous time would not have been believed.”

New money wasn’t far behind. A Northern group, headed by T.T. Cole, entered the scene, purchasing the resort as an investment in 1925 and forming the publicly sold Jackson Springs Hotel Corporation. There were big plans for development that envisioned a golf course and enlarged lake.

But if spring waters rise, they also tumble.

A Slow Fade, A Fast Fire

In truth, the ’20s whimpered more than they roared for Jackson Springs.

Improved roads and the motoring industry were taking off. A day-long trip could be made in an hour or so to the spring to fill jugs from home with water. Overnight stays declined. And while developers always had high hopes to sustain and grow the resort, frequent ownership changes and periods of seasonal closures dammed the flow of progress. Projects and hopes never materialized.

Also, the burgeoning science of modern medicine also trumped marketing, throwing a wet blanket on the supposed curative power of spring waters. And as the local golf industry took off, the mutual relationship that once benefited Pinehurst and Jackson Springs dried up.

By the time the stock market crashed in 1929, the hotel property was unoccupied and in decline. Cole negotiated a sale in 1932 to Frank Welch Sr. of Southern Pines.

Welch had grand designs on returning the resort to its former glory. But on the evening of Wednesday, April 20, 1932, the Currie girls and the good people of Jackson Springs saw smoke coming from the bluff.

Disobeying their mother, the pair ran through the woods and the Jackson Springs Presbyterian Cemetery to the edge of the churchyard, where they had once watched so many swirling skirts and heard so much laughter echo across the gulch.

Flames lit up the twilight sky.

“The smoke was higher and blacker and much closer; we could even feel the heat on our flushed cheeks. We walked on down through the churchyard and sat on the bank above the highway with others who had come to look,” wrote Blue. “Embers were falling all around us, heat was intense, and the sounds of the fire roaring, popping and crackling were frightening. The big hotel on the top of the hill did not last long.”

Lonnie Blue, the local fire warden, was overheard saying, “Boy, I don’t believe we are going to be able to do anything with this one.”

The unoccupied hotel was a total loss.

The Pilot dryly reported on Friday, April 22, “The famous old Jackson Springs hotel is no more.”

In the end, the fire was the least — if not the most permanent — of it. The Depression years came for everyone.

Blue remembers the closure of the Jackson Springs bank and the selling of the furniture and fixtures. Her father bought one of the safes from the bank, which is still in the family. 

The former health resort found itself on the front line of the nation’s response to the Great Depression. Congress established the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in the early 1930s to put people back to work and charged the U.S. Army with putting the program into operation. Company 2412, composed of World War I veterans, made a home among the surviving hotel buildings while seeing to their duties of fighting forest fires, building fire trails and roads, and various agricultural projects.

The last train pulled out of Jackson Springs in 1938. 

Hope Springs Eternal

This has been a story about a town with a long, idyllic history, rich folklore and hopeful vision. But it only skims the surface of the deep wellspring of Jackson Springs, which is the people who have made it so: the Curries, who worked the mill from the days of the Civil War; the tenant farmers who worked the land; the postmasters — including many women — who kept Jackson Springs on the map; the sixth- and seventh-graders who ran away from the school at recess one April Fool’s Day to play under a grove of weeping willows.

There have been preachers who held revivals; old men who gathered on Saturday afternoons at Blake’s store; the old woman who smoked a corncob pipe; the sturdy Presbyterians who nurtured an 8-year-old, orphaned Harris Blake, the ninth child of a tenant family. Blake went on to become a local real estate agent and was elected to the N.C. Senate in 2002, serving five terms representing Moore County. He established the Jackson Springs Historical Preservation Foundation in the early 2000s and set about the task of restoring the train depot and holding regular “homecomings.” He passed the leadership of the foundation to Burroughs prior to his death in 2014.

Blake’s daughter, Joy Donat, remembers her father taking time from his busy schedule to visit the spring.

“He would have all these things going on, and he would come sit by the spring with the newspaper,” she said. “You know, there’s just a certain way that the wind blows through those trees, and I think it was just really relaxing and grounding for him.”

Blake would also invite folks to come share a hot dog or a hamburger on a grill he kept down there because he wanted to share the springs with anyone who would join him.

Donat remembers a milk jug filled with brownish water in her maternal grandmother’s refrigerator. She warily eyed it at every Sunday lunch, but her grandmother would take a sip or two a day of the “medicine” to keep her constitution.

In real estate like her father, Donat wonders about the future of Jackson Springs. It abuts the growing areas of Foxfire and Seven Lakes. Much of the land in Jackson Springs is still held by the fine old Scottish families who made their way to these Sandhills in the 1700s.

Donat dreamily entertains the notion of a comeback for the spring area. “There is potential to bring back that whole area. There could be a country store. There are some things that could be done, but it’s having the vision and the right person for it.”

The area lacks the basic infrastructure of water and sewer, and the sandy soil makes well-digging difficult. 

It’s kind of interesting just thinking about what the next generation looks like,” Donat said. “It would take the right developer with the right mindset in terms of restoring it back to that once flourishing community.”

Many of the sons and daughters of Jackson Springs have gone on to do important things: nurses and doctors, preachers and teachers, business leaders and entrepreneurs, farmers and at least one professional golfer.

Annette Thompson, part of the Currie clan, works as a golf pro at a private club in South Florida. She comes home every May and June to teach at schools Peggy Kirk Bell started long ago at Pine Needles in Southern Pines.

Thompson says of her home place, “People did three things: They raised tobacco, they raised peaches, and they played golf — and it didn’t take me long to figure out who was having the most fun.”

Her annual visits give her a chance to visit all her cousins. Jackson Springs is a special place.

“It’s three things,” she said. “It’s the people. It’s the geography — the actual beauty of it. And it’s the rural and historical setting.”

The Steps of Time

That historical setting? It’s the base of those steps covered with leaves, time and memories. They lead to the ghostly echoes of a luxurious past, but also to a future shaped by Scottish grit and values of community, industry and education.

The drivers of all those trucks and cars barreling down N.C. 73 might feel a fleeting curiosity about the serene section of land around that old, brick Presbyterian church on the hill. For a moment, you might mistake the area for the mountains. The setting projects a sense of tranquility that drew people to the area centuries ago. 

Burroughs thinks about her mother, who lived her whole life in the home where she was born. In her flowerbed stood a stone with an engraving: “Just let me live in my house by the side of the road and be a friend to man.”

Those Currie siblings had a prime seat as the horse and cart gave way to the Model-Ts; as rail gave way to road; as a world-class resort went up in flames and gave way to another world-class resort; as people endured.

The hotel was grand, but so is the legacy of Jackson Springs.

“Even though we’re small,” says Burroughs, “we have always been mighty in a lot of ways.”

Contact Maggie Beamguard at maggie@thepilot.com.