The Warm Springs

Did you know? Before there was any hotel, people came to the Warm Springs, about five miles from Huntingdon on Standing Stone Creek, to take the waters.

The Rev. Philip Fithian rode out to the springs in August 1775. He found twenty two people there "professedly indisposed," living in low cabins built with slabs and boughs and cooking their dinners all at one great common fire, with not a single house or any cleared land between the springs and town. The men played quoits and hunted deer, turkeys and pheasants. On smooth blue stones brought up from a brook and used as seats, visitors had inscribed the names of great numbers who had been there before.

The county history of 1883 says landlords kept a public house at the springs from about 1800, and that Gen. A. P. Wilson later built a hotel of good capacity there. For several years the place had its own post office, called Wilsonia. By 1883 the house was closed and the place practically abandoned. The state's geological report of 1885 noted that the spring water was "not by any means warm." The hotel was advertised for sheriff's sale in 1887, and in October 1895 a forest fire threatened what the Centre Reporter called "the once famous summer hotel at Warm Springs."

Myer Souders tells us his fourth great grandfather, Elisha Green, is one of the first settlers of Oneida Township named in John W. Jordan's 1913 history of the Juniata Valley.

Checked 2026-10-09 · County histories and primary sources, read in full

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