Nashville History Corner

PRIMM SPRINGS

BY RIDLEY WILLS II

One day in the early 1960s, Bill Phillip, a friend of mine from Birmingham, and I were exploring rural Hickman County looking for an old 19t century spa called Primm Springs. Turning off Highway 100 to the southeast just beyond Bon Aqua we took two right turns on a country road and then proceeded down another paved road generally to the left until we found ourselves in a remote hollow with dilapidated frame buildings on both sides of Puppy Branch, a small creek. Getting out of the car, it looked as if the place was a ghost hotel with nobody there. We were wrong as we met Miss Huella, the aging proprietor, who told us that she was open on weekends and that she still lived there, even in the winters, in a big, frame house she and her sister owned up the same hollow.

Once inside, we saw an ancient registration book, in which there were, in ink, the names of visitors. The entries for the past 50 years were primarily entered by people coming to Primm Springs to have a Sunday dinner of fried chicken or country ham. The earlier entries were often made by people traveling by horseback or in buggies between Nashville and Memphis.

Bill and I walked over a covered bridge spanning Puppy Branch and realized that the bridge held the hotel’s toilets, which allowed excrement to fall directly into the fast-moving creek. We also noticed that the windows had no screens and there seemed to be no flies.

Primm Springs closed in 1965, a couple of years after our visit, which had been like stepping back three generations in time.

Here is a capsule of Primm Springs’s history. In the 1860s, Daniel J. Estes and his wife rode horseback into Puppy Branch Hollow to a mineral spring Mrs. Estes knew about as she grew up in the neighborhood. There, finding a vacant hunter’s cabin, they made camp. By summer’s end, Mr. Estes’s stomach ailment disappeared. They returned to Monsanto in Maury County, where they lived.

Mr. Estes formed a stockholder company that bought up the land around the mineral spring and built cottages and a hotel there. He named the resort for George Primm, a Revolutionary soldier who originally owned the property.

The original hotel had only two rooms, one for ladies and the other for gentlemen. Guests slept in double decker bunks on straw ticks. When this proved inadequate, Estes built a second 12-room inn and finally the 30 room inn that stood until well after the hotel closed. He named the third inn for himself, the Estes House. After he died, his son, F. R. Estes and his son’s brother-in-law, John W. Cecil, owned Primm Springs. Estes bought Cecil out.

In its heyday, the Primm Springs Resort, during F. R. Estes’s time featured mineral water, which dripped from a nearby spring house. It also had as many as 500 or 600 guests over a summer weekend who enjoyed dancing in an open-air ballroom and bowling in the bowling alley.

When F. R. Estes died, his widow and their daughter, Miss Huella, took over. Nineteen years later, when Mrs. Estes died, Huella, and her sister, Miss Fannie, inherited the place. There are still three hotels in the remote hollow.

In time, however, the guest houses and the two hotels up the hollow were boarded up, the bowling closed and Miss Huella and Miss Fannie, hamstrung from a lack of help, shut down during the week and only were open on Saturdays and Sundays. During the Depression, Miss Huella got a job as postmistress at the nearby post office for $35 a month. This helped supplement her dwindling hotel income.

Nevertheless, Miss Huella made a number of improvements and continued to offer fried chicken to diners. Chicken had been the speciality of the house during her father’s day. She offered the chicken using the slogan “Chicken Three Ways Three Times a Day.”

In 1945, the resort closed its doors to overnight guests, only to later reopen it on weekends. Huella’s financial problems remained, however, because Primm Springs was hard to find, there was a lack of help, and by the fact that the State Health Department gave the resort a D rating every year because of its lack of screens on the doors and windows. As there was no one in the family’s next generation interested in taking over the aging hotel, it closed in 1965. I have no idea if the Estes House is still there.