Hot Springs National Park is in a certain sense the world’s first national park, having been set aside by Congress as Hot Springs Reservation in 1832. Unlike most national parks since then, it wasn’t singled out for its outstanding scenery or historic value, but for the supposed therapeutic values of the spring waters.
Click image to download a 19.9-MB PDF of this 36-page booklet.
Today, those therapeutic values are in disrepute, and the city’s “ten million dollar bathhouse row” stands mostly empty and must be a headache for the Park Service, or at least for the taxpayers who have to pay to maintain them for their historic value as a quack cure. But in 1928, as this booklet says, people traveled “there not only from the four corners of this country, but from all parts of the world, seeking and finding health as well as blessed respite from today’s nerve-wracking business and social stress.” Many, if not most, of those people got to Hot Springs on the Missouri Pacific.