AT A GLANCE
Why go?
George Washington's Bathtub is a narrow natural spring pool in Berkeley Springs State Park, West Virginia, where the future first president is said to have bathed during his many visits to these famed warm mineral springs. The pool—a shallow, rock-hollowed basin protected by stone walls—predates all formal bathhouses in the area and represents the most primitive form of spa culture in colonial America.↗↗
Today this humble landmark sits within a park that still flows with mineral-rich water at a constant 74.3°F, alongside a functioning historic bathhouse and modern spa facilities. Visitors can see the very pool where a 16-year-old surveyor first dipped into Virginia's most celebrated springs, then explore the surrounding grounds that grew into what was called America's first spa town.↗↗
A Dipping Place from the Colonial Frontier
Long before the elegant brick bathhouses rose around it, the warm springs at what is now Berkeley Springs offered nothing more than natural hollows in the earth. In those early years, "a large hollow scooped in the sand, surrounded by a screen of pine brush, was the only bathing-house" where colonial visitors—including a teenage George Washington—immersed themselves in the mineral waters. The stone-lined pool now known as George Washington's Bathtub is a direct descendant of those primitive dugout baths, its basin carved down to the natural rock from which the spring water rises.
