Congress authorised a sanitarium at Hot Springs in 1902 as a branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, and an unusual branch: purely medical, with no domiciliary role, sited to put veterans with tuberculosis and joint disease into thin dry air near mineral water. Thomas Rogers Kimball of Omaha designed it in the local pink sandstone, part Mission Revival and part Richardsonian Romanesque, laid out as a circular centre with wards radiating from it like the spokes of a wheel. George Kessler of Kansas City laid out the grounds. It opened in April 1907 with forty eight patients and was made a National Historic Landmark in June 2011. That was the same year the Department of Veterans Affairs proposed to close it, moving services sixty miles north to Rapid City and leaving an outpatient clinic behind. The campaign against the plan ran most of a decade, through environmental reviews and public hearings, and it won. The Department formally rescinded the decision in the Federal Register on 13 October 2020. A second proposal in 2022, from a national infrastructure review commission, died when senators refused to confirm the commissioners who would have carried it out. The hospital is still open on North Fifth Street, which makes it one of very few buildings of its kind still doing the work it was built for.
Getting there
43.4369, -103.4790
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
