Vishnu Springs

An abandoned spring resort with a few buildings still standing

Vishnu Springs is a ruined resort town hidden in a river valley in Tennessee Township, in west-central McDonough County, Illinois. It grew up around a natural artesian spring said to cure all manner of physical and mental ailments, and through the 1880s crowds as large as 2,000 gathered in the valley. Some time in that decade the place took the name of the Hindu god Vishnu, for the supposed healing power of its water.

Darius Hicks, whose family owned the land, turned it into a town and health resort in the late 1800s. He cut the land into plots and sold them for $30 each, and in 1889 he built the centrepiece, the Capitol Hotel, a small building of 26 by 40 feet with around 20 rooms, a kitchen and a ballroom. Hicks also had the water sent to Rush University Medical Center for analysis, and that 1889 record survives in the Western Illinois University archives. Roger Viadero of the university's Institute for Environmental Studies found the water much as it was then, rich in minerals with plenty of iron and some calcium. The town had a blacksmith shop and a restaurant, and later parks, a fishing pond, a racetrack and a schoolhouse, and visitors came by horse and buggy from Colchester.

It never prospered. No railroad came and no navigable river reached it, Hicks left in 1903, and under indifferent management the town decayed until, by the 1920s, it was all but abandoned. Ira Post revived it as a vacation and picnic spot in 1935, with limited success until he died in the 1950s. Later came a try at a restaurant and country music attraction in 1968, and in the 1970s a commune of Western Illinois University students who farmed, kept livestock and held music festivals. Dennis Young, who rented a room there in the mid-1970s, remembered how a couple married there in 1929 might come down the hill asking to tour the hotel. By 1982 it stood empty again.

The hotel is the only building left, one of the oldest in the county, battered by vandals and covered in graffiti. In 2003 the 140-acre site went to the Western Illinois University Foundation as the Ira and Reatha T. Post Wildlife Sanctuary, for research and conservation, and it is mostly closed to the public. The spring still flows. A local group, Friends of Vishnu, holds an open house every few years; more than 1,500 people came to the one in 2009, and some visitors come because they believe the place is haunted.