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Historic place

Battle Mountain Sanitarium

500 North 5th Street, Hot Springs, SD

Congress built a soldiers' home in Hot Springs specifically so disabled Civil War and Spanish-American War veterans could bathe in and drink the town's mineral waters — and the same pink-sandstone campus is now a VA hospital.

📅 1907–present🏛️ Historic LandmarkRepurposedBuilt 1907
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Battle Mountain Sanitarium, 500 North 5th Street, Hot Springs, SD
Battle Mountain Sanitarium, Hot Springs · Alexander Daubert, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The story

Authorized by Congress in 1902 and opened in 1907, the Battle Mountain Sanitarium treated veterans — especially those with rheumatism and tuberculosis — whose conditions doctors believed the hot springs could help. Omaha architect Thomas Rogers Kimball designed the complex in Mission Revival/Richardsonian Romanesque style from local pink sandstone, with a circular central building and wings radiating like spokes, on grounds landscaped by George Kessler. It became part of the VA system and continues as a VA medical center today; it was named a National Historic Landmark District in 2011.

Everything that was here

Did you know?

Veterans were sent here specifically to bathe in and drink the mineral water as treatment.
The main building was designed with a circular center and wings radiating outward like wheel spokes.
It was named a National Historic Landmark District in 2011, over a century after opening.

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Explore the full web of connections on the map.

Nearby history

Pioneer Museum

300 North Chicago Street · 383 m away
A sandstone schoolhouse built in 1893 to educate all twelve grades of Hot Springs students now holds the town's pioneer-

Evans Plunge

1145 North River Street · 595 m away
Businessman Fred "Big Fred" Evans built a wood, iron, and glass pool house over a cluster of warm mineral springs in 189

Hot Springs Historic District

River Street Historic District · 640 m away
Boomtown Hot Springs rebuilt its downtown almost entirely out of locally quarried pink sandstone in the 1890s, and that

The Mammoth Site

1800 US Highway 18 Bypass · 1.4 km away
A bulldozer clearing land for a housing subdivision in 1974 broke into a 26,000-year-old sinkhole packed with the bones

Cascade Springs Resort

SD Highway 71 (Cascade Springs) · 12.9 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

Wind Cave National Park

26611 US Highway 385 · 13.3 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

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Sourceshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Mountain_Sanitarium