Chick Springs

The History of Chick Springs

Chick Springs, nestled in what is now Taylors, South Carolina, has long been a place of gathering, healing, and hospitality. Before European settlement, the Cherokee people knew the mineral spring as "Lick Spring"—a place where deer gathered to lick the mineral-rich rocks surrounding the cool, clear water that bubbled up from the earth.

The spring was documented by Governor John Drayton in 1802 and by Robert Mills in his 1826 Statistics of South Carolina well before Dr. Burwell Chick, a Virginia-born physician, arrived in 1838. Guided to the spring by local Indians, Chick spent two years assembling the land around it and by 1840 had opened one of the Upstate's first destination resorts. Within two years, a sixty-room hotel offered board at a dollar a day, and a newspaper reporter would soon call it "this Saratoga of Greenville"—a place where Louisiana cotton planters mingled with local farmers on the piazzas, with pianos, dances until midnight, and a Catholic priest whose summer masses were the first held in Greenville County.

By the late 19th century, the railroad's arrival transformed access to the area. Visitors came from Charleston, Richmond, and New Orleans. But the railroad also began pulling the community's center of gravity away from the spring. Over three decades, the road was rerouted, the schoolhouse was physically moved, the church voted to relocate, and the post office was renamed. By 1904, "Chick Springs" had become "Taylors"—the spring that organized a community yielding to the railroad stop that bore hotel manager Alfred Taylor's family name.

The spring kept drawing people. J.A. Bull, a Greenville grocer, purchased the property in 1903 and expanded the hotel from sixteen rooms to 119. By 1904, the resort was taking out full-page ads in the Atlanta Journal, marketing across the Southeast. Four thousand guests registered in a single season, arriving on six daily trains. Fire destroyed the E-shaped hotel in December 1907. A new one went up by 1914, and after a brief run as a military academy during World War I, Dr. Ben Steedly converted it into a clinic and sanitarium—a $250,000 corporation with a nursing school and patients from across the state. When he died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage in January 1932, the clinic went into receivership within weeks.

Then the state built Highway 29 through the property in 1925. An inadequate culvert turned the road embankment into a dam, and in September 1929, flooding submerged the site in twenty feet of water. The company won a landmark South Carolina Supreme Court case, but the damage—arriving alongside Steedly's death and the Depression—was irreversible.

What followed wasn't a quiet disappearance. A Spartanburg car dealer acquired the hotel at a federal foreclosure auction in 1937. By late 1938, it was being rented as apartments. By early 1939, its boilers were being sold off at "give-away price." In March 1940, the Greenville News photographed the building being torn down for a real estate subdivision. The most significant building in the area, and a single newspaper photo marks its end.

But one thing outlasted everything. Bull had built a swimming pool fed by Lick Creek in 1926, and for nearly fifty years it kept the Chick Springs name alive. Through the 1930s, it drew crowds for Red Cross swim lessons and water shows. From the 1950s through 1972, it was the place to be for a generation of Taylors High School students—with a tin slide, a high dive, a jukebox, and a shag dance floor. It closed in late 1970s, and public access ended.

For the next two decades, a network of local historians and conservationists fought to bring the property back. That effort spanned nearly twenty years before Taylors TownSquare acquired the core 8.62-acre spring site in July 2024. Months later, Hurricane Helene destroyed the historic springhouse. Restoration is now underway.

Chick Springs is the place that made Taylors. For two hundred years, people have gathered here to take the waters, to swim, to dance, to heal. Many know the name. Few know the story. We're working to change that.

Greenville County Council Member Mike Barnes (left), Taylors TownSquare President Alex Reynolds (center), and For 8 Corporation Project Manger Lily Niemela (right) at the Chick Springs site after the title signing on May 29, 2024.