Hot Lake Hotel

Beside a sulphur lake in eastern Oregon that Washington Irving's sources already called "extremely noisome" in 1812 stands a three-storey brick sanatorium finished in 1906. It was built not by a doctor but by the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company and Walter M. Pierce, a future governor, who laid an expensive line right past the door. The surgeon W. T. Phy arrived afterwards as assistant manager and only took charge in 1917, turning it into "the Mayo Clinic of the West": a 60-bed surgical ward, early x-ray diagnosis, four transcontinental trains a day. Fire took the wooden wings in 1934, the aged were housed there from 1951, and after 1974 the building stood mostly empty. That is when the ghost stories start: the earliest printed account, Mike Helm's in 1983, quotes the owner of the day flatly denying them. It was never an asylum, and the surgical equipment famously left inside was recorded in the federal register file in 1978, years before anyone was hunting ghosts. Restored twice, it reopened in 2020 as a hot springs resort that does not sell its ghost.

The lake came first, and it was already famous for being unpleasant. In the summer of 1812 Robert Stuart's eastbound party of the Pacific Fur Company crossed the Grande Ronde plain and passed a steaming pool that Washington Irving would describe, from their journals, in "Astoria" (1836): "a great pool of water, three hundred yards in circumference, fed by a sulphur spring, about ten feet in diameter, boiling up in one corner. The vapor from this pool was extremely noisome, and tainted the air for a considerable distance." Irving does not name the valley; the National Register nomination that later quoted him added the gloss. Native people had been coming to the sulphur springs long before that; the Register file records the name "Ea-kesh-pa", and the present owners attribute it to the Nez Perce. The resort began in 1864, when Samuel Fitzgerald Newhart arrived in the Grande Ronde Valley from California and built a hotel, a row of bath houses with wooden tubs for mud and hot mineral treatments, and a dance hall, in partnership with a man named Clark. Clark died in 1878. The enterprise was incorporated in 1887 and sold in 1900 to a Dr. Minthorn, who built a newer facility with a partner remembered only as "Bear" Cook before selling his interest to a Dr. Tape and going off to invest in a spa on the Oregon coast. What turned Hot Lake into an institution was the railway. The Oregon Railway & Navigation Company had laid an expensive stretch of line directly in front of the hotel — bypassing Union, the county seat, on a route that made no obvious engineering sense — and it bought the resort from Tape in partnership with Walter M. Pierce, a Pendleton lawyer who would go on to serve as state senator, Governor of Oregon (1923-1927) and congressman (1933-1943). After several years of construction, their $150,000 three-storey brick and concrete building was finished and opened for use in 1906. It ran to some 65,000 square feet and was said to have been patterned after the newest bathhouses at Hot Springs, Arkansas. The Register nomination states plainly that the architect is not known; Oregon's state historic sites database records "possibly John V. Bennes", and the current owners attribute it to Bennes outright. This matters because of who did not build it. Dr. William T. Phy, the name attached to Hot Lake ever since, arrived afterwards: Pierce recruited him as assistant manager once the east wing was up. Phy was a local man who had trained in medicine in Kansas City and done postgraduate work in the East. The railway's own 1911 tourist guide, "Outings in Oregon", shows what the place actually was. It advertised "an institution inviting to the sick, and attractive to all", with over $400,000 spent on a brick building with a 600-foot frontage 200 yards from the station. "The hospital department is on the third floor; here are wards and private rooms. The surgical equipment is complete. The operating room has white tiling floors, walls and ceiling, metal doors, and is perfectly lighted." Rates ran from $2 to $3.50 a day. The guide's boast that "the Sanatorium is a small community in itself, every want being provided under the one roof" is the origin of the nickname "The Town Under One Roof". That year the business took $178,000, at a time when meals started at 25 cents. Shortly afterwards Phy left, reportedly after a dispute with Pierce over control of operations. He was brought back in 1917 and floated a $96,000 renovation bond through the Boise Trust Company, paid off in under five years, and it is from that point that Hot Lake's international reputation dates. Phy was known for the early use of x-rays as a diagnostic tool and for radiological treatment of cancer; he sat on the State Board of Health and served as assistant adjutant of the US Army Medical Corps while on leave. Hot Lake was called "the Mayo Clinic of the West", a phrase the Register file says the original Rochester clinic itself endorsed. At its height the complex held a 60-bed surgical ward, ballroom, poolroom, cafeteria, barber shop, drug store, laboratories and x-ray rooms, employed between 125 and 175 people, and in 1924 averaged 125 new guests a day, with four transcontinental trains stopping daily at Hot Lake station. Its closed-loop geothermal heating system, installed with the 1905-1906 construction, is believed to be among the oldest in any large commercial building in the United States. The collapse was quick. Phy died in 1932 — some accounts say 1931 — and his son Mark T. Phy, also a surgeon and administrator, died the following year. The Depression closed every local bank; by 1934 the resort had more than $250,000 of unpaid patient accounts on its books when it applied for federal reconstruction funds. That same year, with maintenance abandoned, fire destroyed most of the wooden portion of the main building and the old hotel of about 1900. Only the brick survived, and it never recovered. After that the building was rented out to whatever would pay. It served as a flight school and nurse training centre during the Second World War. A. J. Roth acquired it in 1941 and in 1951 turned it into a home for the aged, which the Register describes as well maintained and financially successful. A partnership bought it from Roth in 1974 and closed the rest home — its only income — abruptly; a restaurant opened without much success and no guest rooms were ever reopened. In November 1977 the Hot Lake Development Company took it on, and it was its president, Stephen M. Munson, who prepared the nomination that put the property on the National Register of Historic Places on 15 March 1979 (reference 79002148). That file describes an extraordinary plan — 105 guest rooms, a disco in the show barn, a banquet hall for 700 under a canopy of stained glass — which never happened. Dr. Lyle Griffith ran a bath house there in the mid-1980s. The building was abandoned in 1991. It has been restored twice since. The sculptor David Manuel bought the ruin in 2003, opened it for tours in 2005 and by 2010 was running a bed and breakfast, a restaurant, a bronze foundry and a history centre in it, surviving the collapse of the west wing in 2008. In 2020 the owners of the neighbouring Grande Hot Springs RV Resort took over and began a further phase of work.

Hot Lake is open, it is a working hot springs resort, and it is not the business it was even ten years ago. Under the current owners the bronze foundry, the sculpture gallery, the history centre and the antique fire truck collection of the Manuel years are gone; the draw now is the water. The address is 66172 Highway 203, La Grande, Oregon 97850, a couple of miles from Interstate 84 south-east of La Grande. The business trades as Hot Lake Springs Resort — telephone (541) 226-3944, email [email protected]. Note that the old domain hotlakesprings.com no longer belongs to the resort and now serves an unrelated commercial site; the current one is hotlakespringsresort.com. Day-use soaking is by online reservation only and cannot be walked into. As of August 2026 it costs $20 Monday to Thursday and $29 Friday to Sunday, from 08:00 to 20:00 every day, with a two-for-one Wednesday offer running through 2026. Soaking ends at 20:00 and there is no re-entry once you leave. There are nine outdoor communal pools along the shore of the lake — round pools seating six to eight, a historic brick pool and a rock pool seating eight to ten, square pools seating about six — plus a single-person cold plunge kept at roughly 40-45 °F. The resort says up to two million gallons of mineral water a day emerge at about 186 °F and are cooled before reaching the pools. The age rules are strict and catch people out: you must be 18 with ID to make a booking, 12- to 17-year-olds must be accompanied by an adult in the soaking area, and children of 11 and under are not admitted to it at all. The pools are a designated quiet zone — low voices, no music. Glass, food, outside alcohol and pets are banned there. Bring a towel or robe (or buy one at the desk), sturdy shoes and a water bottle that will not blow over, because it is windy. Arrive within fifteen minutes of your slot or the reservation may be cancelled, and pools can close at any time for weather, lightning or power cuts. Sixteen rooms are let in the 1906 brick lodge, from single queens to two-bedroom suites, several with clawfoot soaking tubs in the room and one, Room 118, with a zero-entry ADA shower and step-free access. Overnight guests soak free and have 24-hour access. Check-in is 16:00 to 22:00 Pacific time, check-out at noon; cancellations more than twelve hours ahead are refunded in full, and inside twelve hours are charged at half. On site there is the Thermal Pub & Eatery, a gift shop and a 60-seat cinema running Thursday to Sunday. One thing not on the menu: there is no ghost tour, no paranormal night and no haunted-history package. If that is what you are coming for, you will have to bring it yourself, and it is worth respecting that the house has never sold it.