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Historic place

Evans Plunge

1145 North River Street, Hot Springs, SD

Businessman Fred "Big Fred" Evans built a wood, iron, and glass pool house over a cluster of warm mineral springs in 1890, creating what is still billed as the world's largest naturally warm indoor mineral pool.

📅 1890–present🏛️ Mineral SpringsStill hereBuilt 1890
Open on the mapSlide back to 1890
Evans Plunge, 1145 North River Street, Hot Springs, SD
Evans Plunge, Hot Springs · Runner1928, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The story

The spring had changed hands several times in the early-1880s land rush — reportedly once traded for a horse worth $35 — before Fred Evans bought the property in 1890 and built a large pool structure directly over the springs, capitalizing on Hot Springs' boom as a Gilded Age mineral-water resort. The naturally ~87°F water still flows continuously through the pool. The original 1890 building was replaced in the 1970s over the same springs, and the City of Hot Springs took over ownership in 2013.

Everything that was here

Did you know?

The spring site was once traded for a horse worth $35 in the early 1880s.
The pool stays a naturally warm ~87°F year-round, fed continuously by the springs.
The current building dates to the 1970s — same springs, different building.

Connected places

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Pioneer Museum

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Cascade Springs Resort

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Explore the full web of connections on the map.

Nearby history

Hot Springs Historic District

River Street Historic District · 57 m away
Boomtown Hot Springs rebuilt its downtown almost entirely out of locally quarried pink sandstone in the 1890s, and that

Battle Mountain Sanitarium

500 North 5th Street · 595 m away
Congress built a soldiers' home in Hot Springs specifically so disabled Civil War and Spanish-American War veterans coul

Pioneer Museum

300 North Chicago Street · 926 m away
A sandstone schoolhouse built in 1893 to educate all twelve grades of Hot Springs students now holds the town's pioneer-

The Mammoth Site

1800 US Highway 18 Bypass · 1.8 km away
A bulldozer clearing land for a housing subdivision in 1974 broke into a 26,000-year-old sinkhole packed with the bones

Wind Cave National Park

26611 US Highway 385 · 12.8 km away
A hole in the prairie that blew a man's hat off in 1881 turned out to be the entrance to the world's first cave ever des

Cascade Springs Resort

SD Highway 71 (Cascade Springs) · 13.2 km away
Developers platted a 36-block resort city around a spring gushing 2,000 gallons of warm water a minute and planned a fou

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Sourceshttps://www.evansplunge.com/our-story