In the 1890s, what was perhaps the top resort in the state was located in the rolling hills seven miles east of Hot Springs. Known as Potash Sulphur Springs, the resort attracted thousands of visitors each year. They arrived by stagecoach from the Lawrence Station of the Hot Springs Railroad and were amazed to find a resort with a two-story hotel, a large dining hall, swank guest cottages, a bowling alley, a shooting gallery, a fishing lake, tennis courts, a billiard hall, a bathhouse and a riding stable.
If Steve Arrison, the chief executive officer of the Hot Springs Advertising & Promotion Commission, has his way, the site will again attract thousands of visitors each year. From 1961-86, what’s now known as Umetco Minerals Corp. mined vanadium at the site. Vanadium is used to make steel, and what was known locally as the Wilson Mine once was considered the best source of vanadium in the country.
For the past 27 years, Umetco has worked to restore the almost 500 acres where vanadium was mined. The long reclamation process has been monitored by the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality. There’s no marked entrance to the site, which isn’t open to the public. During a recent tour, I turned off U.S. 270 near Lakeside Baptist Church, cleared security at a small metal building and soon was in a former mining zone I didn’t even know existed.
Umetco has spent more than $40 million on the reclamation process. Four plateaus were created from the mining spoils. From the highest plateau, we could see for miles on a clear spring morning. In addition to big fields in which grass has been planted, there are woods, a creek and a couple of former mining pits that are now lakes.
“The site is beautiful,” Arrison says. “It contains enough room to accommodate a top-notch athletic complex. We immediately saw the potential for the site, and Umetco representatives were receptive to our ideas. It’s a hidden gem located near hotels and other attractions and next to the Martin Luther King Bypass.”
Arrison envisions one of the South’s top complexes for baseball, softball and soccer. State, regional and national tournaments would fill hotel rooms and restaurants with outof-town customers. Arrison says the site represents a “once-in-a-generation opportunity for a complex that could benefit Hot Springs while taking advantage of this reclaimed site. If this partnership ultimately comes to fruition, this could be the example for others to follow-a government entity and a private company coming together to improve their community.” The Hot Springs Advertising & Promotion Commission had been looking for just such a site for several years. In the surrounding Ouachita Mountains, though, it was hard to find enough flat land tobuild the complex. Arrison feared the dirt work alone would cost millions of dollars. He knew a regional sports complex could be a good fit for a commission that already is in the sports business, having attracted the state high school basketballchampionships and the Sun Belt Conference basketball tournament to Hot Springs in recent years. Last year, the commission unveiled the Hot Springs Historic Baseball Trail, a collection of historic markers that outline the city’s role as the birthplace of spring training for professional baseball.
Arrison was about to give up on finding a suitable site for a sports complex when he received a call from Ed Davis, the city’s fire chief. Here was Davis’ message: “Steve, you’ve got to see this. You’re not going to believe it.”
“It was the place we had been looking for,” Arrison says. “I know people who had lived out that wayall their lives and had never seen it. Umetco and the ADEQ have done an amazing job of reclaiming the site.”
There’s also the historic connection to Potash Sulphur Springs. Dr. J.T. Fairchild, who once owned the resort, wrote in the 1890 edition of Cutter’s Guide to the Hot Springs of Arkansas: “For individuals so unfortunate as to be afflicted with dyspepsia, gout, rheumatism, afflictions of the liver, kidneys and urinary organs, female diseases, dropsy and all complaints originating from an excess acid in the system, skin diseases and chronic dysentery, there is no better cure for many of these diseases than potash-sulphur water.”
Writing for the Garland County Historical Society in 2009, Henry de Linde noted: “By 1890, Potash Sulphur Spring water was bottled and sold to the public. Compressed air was added to quart bottles of water to preserve medicinal properties. The charge for the water was $6 for 50 quarts, paid in advance.”
Union Carbide geologists began to test the area for vanadium in 1960. By 1965, it was determined that themines were large enough to justify construction of a nearby vanadium plant. An eight-page special section of Hot Springs’ afternoon newspaper, The New Era, in May 1967 focused on the facility. It noted that the $14 million complex with150 employees was the world’s first independent raw vanadium operation. Umetco was created in 1984 as a wholly owned subsidiary of Union Carbide. The plant was sold in 1986 to Stratcor. Umetco retained ownership of the mining properties.
Now, the Umetco property is poised to again bring visitors to the Hot Springs area, just as the Potash Sulphur Springs resort did more than a century ago.
Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the president of Arkansas’ Independent Colleges and Universities. He’s also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial, Pages 15 on 05/29/2013