Yellow Springs

Start at the water. Down in the East Meadows at Historic Yellow Springs, 1685 Art School Road in Chester Springs, there is a little 1830s springhouse with an openwork iron gate. They call it the Jenny Lind Springhouse, after the "Swedish Nightingale" visited in 1850. Legend says she got lowered into the pool on a swing. I choose to believe it.

The spring is iron rich. The water ran yellow. Archaeological evidence says Native people were using it thousands of years before anybody built a hotel next to it. And yellow water that looks a little off has always made people think one thing: this must be good for me.

That idea is how Yellow Springs survived three hundred years on one West Pikeland hillside. The village never started over from scratch. It just handed the same buildings a new job: spa resort, Revolutionary hospital, orphan school, PAFA art colony, then a film studio that made The Blob. Same water. Same rooms. Here is that walk.

Act I: The spa

By 1722, Yellow Springs was a fashionable spa village. People came out from Philadelphia to "partake of the waters" and, honestly, to party. The West Meadows were dotted with bathhouses. Two rival hotels went up across from each other, and in 1823 somebody connected them with a covered portico, the Piazza, which still links the Washington Building and the Lincoln Building today.

The ads from back then are the best part. In 1819, a Mrs. Halman told readers of the American Republican she had hired "the best musicians" and was procuring "the best liquors" for harvest season. A magazine called The Port Folio ran a gushing 1810 series about the place: the clean air, the cold bath, the scenery. Influencer copy, two hundred years early.

The Washington Building started as a tavern. Earliest record: a 1750 tavern permit.

Act II: The hospital

Then the war showed up at Yellow Springs. In September 1777, Washington and his troops camped beside the creek in those same West Meadows. That fall the spa village changed jobs.

Washington commissioned a hospital to be built here. Historic Yellow Springs calls it the first military hospital in North America, and the only hospital commissioned by the Continental Congress built during the Revolutionary War. It went up in 1777-78 and was known as Washington Hall. Sick and wounded Continental soldiers came here. Washington himself visited the village several times and used the tavern building as a temporary headquarters. That is where it got its name.

After the war, Washington Hall did not get retired. It became a spa hotel again. A patient wrote his wife in 1847 about getting "packed" in wet sheets for two hours and then jumping headfirst into a very cold plunge bath. Wellness has always been a little unhinged.

Washington Hall burned in 1902, got rebuilt, then burned for good in 1962. What you see now are stabilized ruins on the hillside above the Lincoln Building. Above them, the Philadelphia Unit of the Herb Society of America planted an 18th-century medicinal herb garden. Both were dedicated as a Revolutionary War memorial in 1987.

Act III: The orphan school

The second spa era wound down in the 1860s, right as the Civil War left a lot of kids without fathers. From 1868 to 1912, Yellow Springs was home to the Chester Springs Soldiers' Orphan School, for children of Civil War soldiers.

The old resort buildings turned into a campus. Boys slept and ate in the Washington Building. Girls lived in the Lincoln Building. Washington Hall held classrooms. The 1839 bathhouse got turned into a laundry. Kids make laundry. In 1899 the school built an infirmary, now called the Yeaworth House.

Historic Yellow Springs says "several thousand orphaned children" passed through these grounds. The Moore Archives on site hold the school's records, if you want the names and the paperwork. This is not ghost-story material. It was a school for kids who had lost a lot, and their buildings still stand.

Act IV: The art colony

In 1916, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts moved in and opened its Country School, which ran until 1952. PAFA's pitch was open-air instruction in landscape painting and an artists' colony where artists could help each other.

So the courtyard under that 1823 portico filled with easels. In 1921, PAFA turned an old livery stable into the Small Barn Studio, and you can still spot it by its big skylight. They converted the 1839 bathhouse into an open-air, spring-fed swimming pool. Art students got a pool.

The sculptor Angelo Frudakis, looking back in a 1997 interview, called Chester Springs "a Shangri-la" and said the Sculpture Barn "was like a cathedral, with great north light." That is the review you want.

Act V: The Blob

Here is the Yellow Springs plot twist. From 1952 to 1974, this same village was headquarters for Good News Productions, a film studio that made more than 400 films. One of them was the sci-fi original The Blob.

Yes. The quiet spa hillside with the herb garden and the Revolutionary memorial became home base for a studio that melted small-town America with goo. Good News edited and screened films in the Lincoln Building, put a sound studio in the barn loft, and housed staff in the Washington Building, which had already slept spa guests, orphans, and art students. Washington Hall was a film production studio before it burned in 1962.

Same rooms. New monster.

Close: Still open

In 1974, Historic Yellow Springs, Inc. bought the village and has been saving it since. Today it is 11 buildings and 142 conserved acres, with art classes in the barn studio, trails through the meadows, and the archives open for research.

What to walk: the Washington Building and the portico courtyard. The West Meadows and the 1830s gazebo that holds the iron spring. The hospital ruins and herb garden up the hill. The Small Barn Studio skylight. Then down to the Jenny Lind and Crystal Diamond springhouses in the East Meadows. Check tour times before you go.

This is why I like a deep cut over a quick news blurb. One hillside, three hundred years, and every era left something you can still touch. Go see the spring that started it.