Many historical sites in the U.S. have monuments and other remembrances of Founding Father and President George Washington.
But of all the George Washington showcases, my favorite is a national park in the small town of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. That’s where America’s first president was said to bathe in an open-air brick tub that reads, not surprisingly, “George Washington’s Bath Tub.” It was filled with warm natural mineral spring water emanating from the surrounding mountainous countryside.
What makes traveling to Berkeley Springs most enticing is that we can join, at least figuratively, Washington in sitting in a large indoor bathtub that can easily accommodate two bathers and is filled with 104-degree mineral water. It’s situated in what’s called the Old Roman Bath House.
Like it did for George, the steamy hot water helps us wash away all the bodily aches and stress of contemporary life. If you rub the water over your face, and if your body is so willing, it supposedly helps get rid of your age spots and wrinkles. If nothing else, the spring water makes you feel rejuvenated. In 1776, Washington came here with a group of family and associates who made the warm springs near the Potomac River the country’s first spa.
George had to worry about leading a revolution against the British Empire and later on a presidency. But all my wife and I have to do, other than dealing with the fact that Donald Trump is president of the United States again, is drive about 100 miles from our place in the big city to see why Washington often came here, on horseback, ostensibly to get away from it all.
The novelist and travel writer Robert Louis Stevenson said, it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive. Yes, we drive hopefully through what I call my old “stomping rounds” westward toward Berkeley Springs.
The trip involves one spot important to me, Frederick, Maryland. I was once employed there in the 1970s as a reporter for the city newspaper, the Frederick News-Post. Frederick was at that time a small city on the cusp of a population surge to become a bedroom community of Washington D.C. and Baltimore.
Some 27 miles beyond Frederick is Hagerstown, known as “Hub City” for its many railroads and roads that serve the town. Hagerstown also has significance to my past. I would often meet reporters from the the Herald Mail, covering the same news events. Though we were rivals, we were also friends and colleagues.
It’s good to see the News-Post and Herald-Mail still operating. Maybe that’s why I always have a warm feeling about Hagerstown, because its paper survives.
On one of our frequent journeys toward Berkeley Springs, my wife and I took a side trip further up the superhighway to Cumberland, Maryland, which is called the “City of Churches.” A native we happened to meet by chance in downtown Cumberland told us how that designation came about.
“It’s because we have a lot of sinners,” this gentleman said with a straight face, before we realized he was joking.
I always give West Virginia props when my wife and I drive into the state. I say that even if in recent years it’s turned politically ultra-conservative, opposite my politics and my disapproval for Trump who won 70 percent of the state’s popular vote in 2024.
I recall that before the Civil War, differences of opinion about seceding from the United States caused the breakup of Virginia. Much of it had to do with slavery as Virginia joined the Confederacy and kept slavery legal. Meanwhile, a large abolitionist movement in the state’s western part wanted slavery outlawed. That led to creating West Virginia, which stayed in the Union. To use an old Australian idiom, good on you, West Virginia.
Beyond that history, the late John Denver’s song, “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” about “Wild, Wonderful” West Virginia, has perhaps helped make the state and Berkeley Springs a popular tourist destination.
Instead of paying for a wildly expensive luxurious spa where we live, we choose to sign up at a reasonable rate for a half-hour of bathing in the old bath house. After all, if George Washington could make the long trek on horseback, what’s two hours of our lives to get to where old George used to soak all his troubles away in his favorite hot tub?
Author Bio:
Eric Green, a Highbrow Magazine contributor, is a former newspaper reporter, U.S. congressional press aide, English-as-a-second-language teacher, and now a freelance writer in the Washington D.C. area. His articles have appeared in various newspapers and websites, including the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun.
For Highbrow Magazine
Photo Credits: Depositphotos.com; Warfieldian (Wikimedia Commons); Travel Berkeley Springs (Wikimedia Commons); Wikimedia Commons; G. Edward Johnson (Wikimedia Commons); Andrew Bossi (Wikimedia Commons).
