Healing waters from the belly of Mother Earth

American Visions, Feb-March, 1995 by Beirne Keefer

How a spa and motel--not just any old spa and motel, but a holistic kind of place--came to being in the Wiregrass region of southeastern Alabama, in a town called Cottonwood, can be explained only within the framework created by a man named Bronner. "Looking back," family patriarch Nat Bronner told me a couple of years ago, "this place has been the source of my strength, my very being. And the waters of this place are God's gift to mankind."

Bronner invited me to partake of the waters, and I slipped into the pool of 112-degree elixir flowing from 4,280 feet below. It enveloped me in its natural wrap of minerals; my body lolled in its soothing balm. Muscles relaxed, I floated along, barely aware of the soporific salts surrounding me, and dreamed of my youth, when aches and pains were unknown. Rejuvenated after an hour and a half, I climbed out with younger thoughts.

Nat Bronner passed away in 1993, just shy of his 80th birthday. Nevertheless, his Cottonwood Hot Springs Spa and Motel, tucked away on the edge of a little old Southern town of less than 1,300 people, remains one of our nation's greatest health retreats. This deep-earth aquifer was discovered in 1927, by oil magnate J.R. Sealy. After drilling more than 4,000 feet down, he struck hot water, which spewed forth, covering the men and boys and their equipment. They capped the well and went home.

Later realizing that American Indians viewed mineral hot springs as sacred, Sealy reasoned that this hot, salty water may have medicinal properties. He went back to Cottonwood and invited local patients with chronic skin disorders and aches and pains to bathe. They found relief, and soon Sealy had so many people coming that he set about building bathhouses, charging 10 cents admission.

Years later, a Dr. Ray Evers purchased the springs to practice the art of blood cleansing, a process not much different from kidney dialysis. During those years, Bronner began using the spa in his holistic life, and after Evers was forced to give up his practice (the American Medical Association would not approve his process), he sold the resort to Bronner and moved to Mexico.

Bronner and his brothers had already made their fortune manufacturing cosmetics for African Americans, as the Bronner Bros. Cosmetics Co. Inc. in Atlanta, so Nat was able to pursue his holistic approach to good health at the hot springs, which he saw as a tool to teach people the wonderful feeling of a clean inner and outer body. A practitioner of yoga, he quickly had a legion of followers who adhered to his strict rules, which included a diet of organically grown food and a life free from drugs and alcohol.

A year after his death, there remains no smoking and no alcohol served at this spa, and no televisions or radios in the rooms: "Those are distractions," Bronner admonished. "At this place you need to be in touch with your body." (Still, as a reluctant concession to contemporary times, there's a TV room on the premises.)

Although Bronner would frown on the presence of television, he would be proud of two young office managers from Atlanta who visit the spa almost monthly. ("We need to get young people involved," Bronner once said to me, "before they're bent over and gnarled from a life too long in the fast lane.") Both women take advantage of the bicycle and hiking trails spread throughout the 700 wooded acres owned by the spa. They also find needed respite from their workaday lives. "I come here because it's relaxing," Robin McCory says. "It's like a body massage, and it helps me lose weight."

Her associate, Brenda Murphy, adds, "It relaxes the muscles. In fact, you need to lie down for a while after spending an hour or so in the pool."

Older people, too, frequent the spa. Dwayne Sayers, an aromatherapist, tells of the lady who came to the spa in a wheelchair after having a kidney transplant. "After exercising in the pool, she walked," he says.

Bernestine Reynolds speaks of her son, Ervin, who was scarred from chicken pox. "The scars are gone now," she says.

The relaxing dining room is run by Chef Fritz Hurst. My dinner was a salad of organically grown greens, a filet of sauteed sea trout (no deep frying here) with pico de gano salsa, wild rice, and crunchy broccoli and cauliflower with a breath of basil, all with just the right touch so that you pass up the salt and pepper. If you insist, he'll serve you dessert.

But it's the healing waters, flowing at more than 250,000 gallons every 24 hours, that have attracted people from across the United States. The springs have flowed continuously since 1927, and there seems to be no end to Mother Earth's healing power in this Alabama town called Cottonwood.

RELATED ARTICLE: Cottonwood Hot Springs Spa and Motel

P.O. Box 277 Cottonwood, AL 36320 (800) 526-SPAS

Room rates start at $35. Ask about weekend special and group rates. Amenities include a conference center, worship center, outdoor and indoor pools, a seven-acre fishing lake (bring your own gear), paddleboats, bicycle and nature trails, RV hookups and much more.