Piedmont Springs
At a cost of $35,000 — about a million dollars today — the Piedmont Land & Improvement Company developed the Piedmont Springs Hotel in 1890: a luxurious three-story resort in the Appalachian foothills at 1,600 feet, four miles southeast of town. Thirty-six bedrooms with hot and cold water, cozy parlors, stone fireplaces, guest cottages, a dancing pavilion, and sulfur and chalybeate springs welcomed guests carried up from the trains by horse-drawn wagon, at rates from $2 a day to $40 a month. The resort burned in August 1960; its foundations remain as a testament to a slower pace of life.
Borden-Wheeler
Around 1894, the Borden-Wheeler Company expanded a former land-company clubhouse into a three-story, 100-room hotel at Borden Springs with nine concert pianos, electricity, a large outdoor swimming pool, a dance pavilion, and a golf course — with butlers and servers in tuxedos tending guests who dined and danced to orchestras. The hotel, just off today's Chief Ladiga Trail about two miles east of Piedmont, was destroyed by fire in 1935.
The Signal Hotel
In Bluffton — an iron-ore boomtown of Around 8,000 people in the late 1880s — the three-story Victorian Signal Hotel was among the finest in northern Alabama, with electric lights, elegant furnishings, and waters believed to have healing properties from natural lithium springs. Its guests included author Rudyard Kipling and retired Union General William T. Sherman. When the iron ore played out, so did Bluffton; the hotel stood into the 1950s.
