I am luxuriating in bath-warm water flowing from natural springs, bobbing gently in the graceful effluence of one of America’s first spas. Afternoon sun casts bone-white beams of light onto the walls of a dim wooden chamber. The water is the exact temperature of my blood — 98 degrees — so it feels like precisely nothing. There is no thermal distinction between the water and everything my skin contains. My muscles open. My ligaments gently release.
I am trying very hard not to think about the boils on Thomas Jefferson’s butt.
This is unfortunate, because the experience at the Warm Springs Pools in Bath County, Virginia is otherwise a delight. The Gentlemen’s Pool sits inside a large, wood-framed octagon. A stream flows in on one end, gathers in a stony-bottomed pool about 40 feet across, and slips out into a creek on the other side. In the center, a dozen of us guests hold gray foam noodles under our armpits, suspended at the waterline six feet above the bottom. We’ve been asked not to speak, so as not to disturb anyone’s moment of serenity. The air smells faintly of sulfur.
Jefferson’s Dull, Delicious, and Deadly Bath
When former President Thomas Jefferson arrived at Warm Springs on August 8, 1818, he was 75, freshly off a punishing three-day commission meeting at Rockfish Gap, and suffering from rheumatism that had flared in his knee on the ride over. The next day he wrote to his daughter Martha that he’d tried “a delicious bath” and would do it twice a day from then on.
He also sized up the place with the flat disappointment of a man who’d hoped for better companionship: about 45 guests, “but little gay company,” a “dull time” expected.
By a week in, he’d already escalated to three soaks a day, a quarter hour each, sitting on a stone ledge in the pool. He was, among other things, an obsessive man, driven by the impulses that led him to bankrupt himself renovating Monticello rather than leave well enough alone. He committed to a full three-week course of self-treatment.
That’s when the eruptions on his southern states began.
Doctor, It Hurts When I Sit
By August 21 he was writing to Martha again, in a very different key: “a large swelling on my seat… disabl[ing] me from sitting but on the corner of a chair. Another swelling begins to manifest itself to-day on the other seat.” The author of the Declaration of Independence kept up his thrice-daily visits for roughly another week anyway.
Guy says, “Doc, it hurts when I do this.” Doc says, “Well, then don’t do this.” The historical record is silent on why the founder of the University of Virginia kept taking the waters after his personal seat of government had gone into open rebellion.
This would all be very funny if it hadn’t helped set off a slow-motion physical collapse. Jefferson returned home “prostrated,” as he put it, and doctors treated the ulceration with mercury — first topical, then oral — and then sulfur. Monticello’s own historians believe the infection may have been a true case of septicemia, or blood poisoning, rather than simple boils — a diagnosis that would help explain the bowel and urinary troubles that dogged him for the rest of his life, right up to his death eight years later at 83, famously, on July 4, 1826.
A Storied Spa with a High-Toned Ending
The origin story of Warm Springs says a Native American traveler, exhausted, once stumbled on the waters at dusk and fell asleep in them, waking miraculously restored. Well, sure.
What’s better documented is that archaeologists have found evidence of people visiting this spot for over 9,000 years. The springs don’t come from any volcanic source, just rainwater sinking a mile down along a folded ridge of rock and rising back up, warmed and mineral-rich, at an unwavering 98 degrees.
European settlers happened upon the springs, believing the water could cure practically anything 18th-century medicine couldn’t — which is to say, everything. In 1761 they built a limestone basin around the Warm Springs, said to be the oldest spa structure in the country. It drew visitors from around the colonies, but wouldn’t be enclosed in a proper wooden bathhouse for another 60-odd years.
But Warm Springs itself never became a major resort destination. The real action was taking place a few miles away, at the neighboring community called Hot Springs. A separate hotel went up there in 1766, the ancestor of a much grander hotel that burned in 1901 and rose again the following year as a stately brick pile: the Homestead. The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway had already built a spur line into Hot Springs a decade earlier, specifically to ferry in Gilded Age families chasing curative waters and mountain air.
All of that, followed by a series of acquisitions, renovations, transformations, and real estate transactions, brings us to today’s Omni Homestead Resort — a four-star historic landmark property with a prominent brick tower and two long wings of rooms, now operated by an ultra-luxury hospitality brand. There’s a storied golf course, a sprawling family pool, food of middling corporate quality, and a few throwback carriage-trade diversions like afternoon tea, skeet shooting, and falconry. Rooms rates in-season start around $500 a night when you account for resort and parking fees.
The Warm Springs Pools: a $4 Million Restoration, $35 Fee
The Homestead also operates the Warm Springs Pools themselves — the older, separate bathhouses ten miles up the road, at the original spring, where Jefferson actually soaked.
In 2017 the old wooden structures were close to collapse. The joists were rotting, the foundation splitting away from the frame, and Bath County ordered them shut. Omni spent over $4 million on a faithful restoration, reconstructing what had decayed or been altered over the decades from historic photos rather than reinventing it. The pools reopened in December 2022.
What’s there now is small and simple — a plain office building, the Gentlemen’s Pool, a separate Ladies’ Pool. Some sessions are co-ed with bathing suits required; some are clothing-optional in each. You can book a $35 soak ($40 weekends and holidays) whether or not you’re staying at the resort, though I suspect it’s easier if you are. I was a guest, and walked right in on an in-season Friday afternoon at the exact hour I wanted.
Jefferson’s own stay was nowhere near that effortless, or that luxe. His letters describe plain meals, a homely room, his troublesome soaks, and horseback rides out to see nearby springs and waterfalls. Mostly, he was just bored by his fellow guests. “So dull a place,” he wrote, “and so distressing an ennui I never before knew.”
The single bright spot, by at least one telling, was the innkeeper — a man named Fry, remembered as something of a local character. As the story goes, Fry had a line he liked to deliver to guests making the rounds of Virginia’s spa circuit, ticking off each spring by name: He told them to go get “well charged at the White Sulphur, well salted at the Salt, well sweetened at the Sweet, well boiled at the Hot” — and then come back to him, so he could “Fry” them.
Jefferson, it turns out, took him rather literally. He fried himself at Warm Springs.
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