From hotel to hospital

When the Sweet Spring Hotel opened around 1887, guests came to Eureka Springs for Ozark Mountain air, restorative spring water, and a comfortable place to stay. By 1900, the spacious hotel was advertising meals featuring “the best of the market,” electric streetcars at the door, and rooms for just $1 a day. Life was good.

In 1913, the gracious, veranda-wrapped hotel traded tourists for patients.

That was when Eureka Springs physician Dr. Robert Huntington transformed the building beside Sweet Spring into Huntington Infirmary, the city’s first modern hospital. It offered an operating room, up-to-date equipment, abundant windows, and the best care. The local physicians who treated patients was the husband and wife team, Drs. Albert and Pearl Tatman.

Lovingly known as Doc Pearl, she was one of Arkansas’s earliest female physicians. Some claim she was the first. Known for caring for women and babies, she rode horseback into the surrounding hills and hollers to treat patients, and when peers wouldn’t cross the icy streams and rocky trails, Dr. Pearl did. She even traveled the rugged roads to help workers building the Charcoal Gap Tunnel, a 600-foot tunnel blasted through a ridge near Livingston Hollow.

At the Huntington Infirmary’s entrance on Pine Street, carved figures of a lion and lamb rested peacefully beside the steps as symbols of the peaceable kingdom where suffering ended. Both the hospital and its stone guardians are gone today, but old-timers claim that on quiet nights, the lion will roar and a ghostly figure of a woman in a long coat rests a reassuring hand on its head.

A little way down on Spring Street, in the Silk Stocking District, Dr. Pearl’s Victorian home, known as Cozy Corners, still stands at 256 Spring Street. Once known for gracious gatherings, literary evenings, and the lively social world shared by Drs. Pearl and Albert Tatman, the house later passed to their adopted daughter, Daisy. Today, visitors can stay beneath its historic roof in a rare opportunity to sleep alongside a surviving chapter of Dr. Pearl’s remarkable life.

You’ll pass Dr. Pearl’s house on the Eureka Concierge tour: Climb for the Cure.

Another rabbit hole connection we love is Livingston Junction Cabooses & Cabins. This lodging sits above the historic railroad junction near Livingston Hollow where MO & AR trains connected and continued East through the Charcoal Gap Tunnel. Guests sleep in restored cabooses overlooking the landscape where Eureka Springs railroad history once unfolded.