Welch Spring and Hospital Ruins

Stone shell of a 1913 lung-disease hospital beside a powerful spring

The Welch Spring ruins are reached on foot — about a mile and a half from the parking area at Akers Ferry, on a flat trail that follows the Current River. The hospital is a roofless rectangle of stone with its window openings still intact, standing on a flat above the spring. Behind the building, the spring runs out of a cave mouth that disappears into the bluff.

The spring is one of the bigger ones in the park, with a flow of around 75 million gallons a day. The pool is small but the run from the cave to the river is short and steep, and the colour of the water is good. The cave is gated to protect the bat population; you can look in but you cannot enter.

The site has the quiet melancholy that lost-cause projects acquire after a century — a setting that would be eerie in fog and is just very still in sunlight.

things to do sight
A story
Dr Christian Diehl bought Welch Spring in 1913 on the theory that air drawn through the cave behind the spring was pollen-free and would cure asthma, tuberculosis, and emphysema. The hospital opened, a handful of patients came, the doctor died, the building was abandoned, and the cave reverted to bats and roof drips. Most of his medical thinking has not aged well, but the air inside the cave is, in fact, unusually clean.

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