To the west and south of the city, within walking distance, are the famous Oil and Johnson springs and sixteen springs that feed the city lake that supplies the municipal water system. A bathhouse once stood under the cliff between Johnson and Oil Springs. The oil spring is peculiar in that the waters have an oleaginous feeling when rubbed between the hands. It was once considered beneficial in diseases of the scalp.
Lion Spring flows from the cliff near the back door of the home of Mr. and Mrs. Everett Wheeler, publishers of the Eureka Springs Times-Echo. For many years the Lion Spring Hotel, operated by “Mother” Belden, was located on this site. A stone Lion’s head is set up as a dispensary and the water flows through its mouth. This spring once supplied a stream of water for Dr. Alvah Jackson’s primitive bathhouse in the rock shelter fifty feet below. A wash-tub was secured from a sugar camp on Keel’s Creek and this, with half-a-dozen canteens, constituted the outfit of the first water-cure establishment in this part of the state.
Calip Spring is on South Main Street near the Elk’s Club. It supplied the community watering trough in the early days of the town. Fishermen now use this trough as a depository for minnows. Gadd Spring is farther north on Main Street and is housed in a rock edifice made from crystal and other odd-shaped rocks.
In regard to the springs at Eureka, L. J. Kolklosh wrote in 1881:
“No other springs in the world have had so many cures and such a reputation in so short a time as the Eureka Springs of Arkansas. History does not record an equal.... Eureka had made a name that has been heard throughout Christendom.”
A crazy quilt is made up of pieces arranged without pattern or order. Eureka Springs is like that. It is an architectural labyrinth unique among cities. The recently built annex of the Penn Memorial Baptist Church has a home for the minister on the third floor. You may enter at the street-level door on Mountain Street, walk through the rooms—a distance of about forty feet—and look down upon Owen Street, thirty feet below. This sounds like an architectural fairy tale, but it is true. Houses are built like that in this Switzerland of America. In many homes the street entrance is on the second or third floor, or the house may be reached by a stairway clinging to the mountain side. One business house is surrounded by streets like a moat ’round a castle and it has four street addresses each on a different level. In the early days when the town was thronged with health seekers who wanted homes near the springs, terraces were built and hemmed-in with massive stone walls. Houses were constructed on these terraces with stairways leading from one level to the other. Frequently a natural cave opens at the backdoor. The yards and gardens have the appearance of “The Hanging Gardens of Babylon,” built by Nebuchadnezzar for his hill-loving queen. Some residents may step from their gardens to the roof of the house while others must climb stairways to their patch of vegetables.