1903 – 1907
J.A. Bull transforms a 16-room inn into a 119-room resort with orchestra, telephone, and New York papers by evening post. Four thousand guests in a single season.
Bull, already a prominent Greenville grocer, acquired the resort through $3,000 in common and $9,000 in preferred stock in the newly formed Chick Springs Company. His 1903 ad captures the pitch: “Get the Habit. When you get up feeling badly, don’t drink a glass, drink a half gallon bottle of Chick Springs water before breakfast.”
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Bull enlarged Westmoreland’s 16-room hotel into a three-story, E-shaped resort with 119 double bedrooms, a polished hardwood ballroom with casement windows, six cottages, and an annex. Nixon’s five-piece orchestra from Knoxville played morning and afternoon concerts. The grounds covered 117 acres with tennis, golf, bowling, archery, swimming, horseback riding, and children’s playgrounds with “gentle, patient donkeys.” Long-distance telephone and telegraph connected guests to the world. A full-page illustrated ad ran in the Atlanta Journal on May 29, 1904: “The Ideal Health and Pleasure Resort. Positively no consumptives taken.”
Fire was discovered at 10:30 PM in the unoccupied hotel. Bull, living in the old hotel building nearby, spotted it early but could not operate the firefighting apparatus alone. By the time help arrived, the fire was too far gone. The old hotel and cottages were saved by a bucket brigade and wet blankets. The building—three stories, E-shaped, “probably the handsomest summer resort property in the state,” according to the Yorkville Enquirer, December 1907—was gone. The Beaufort Gazette’s headline, 200 miles away: “Famous Resort Burned.” Bull rebuilt, adding to a cottage to create a 42-room structure. He would not stop.