08/27/2026
Did you know Spring Hill once had a grand resort hotel, complete with an observation tower overlooking Mobile Bay!?
So why have most of us never heard of it? š
I recently came across this old Mobile postcard, and it sent me down yet another local-history rabbit hole because I had absolutely no idea that, for a VERY brief moment in the early 1900s, tourists were riding the trolley out from downtown Mobile to vacation beneath the live oaks at a grand resort in Spring Hill!
The Spring Hill Hotel opened in 1904 on the south side of Old Shell Road, just east of what is now McGregor Avenue. Designed by prominent Mobile architect Rudolph Benz in a āSpanish Renaissanceā style, it had 50 guest rooms, balconies, a dining room that could seat 250, a billiard room, smoking room, electric lights, steam heat and even its own horse and carriage stable.
And that tower you can see peeking out from behind the enormous live oak? Guests could reportedly climb it for views overlooking Mobile and Mobile Bay.
Getting there was part of the experience, too. Visitors could take the electric trolley from downtown Mobile, reaching the hotel in about 30 minutes.
The Spring Hill Hotel was heavily advertised to Northern tourists as a winter resort, promoting Spring Hillās higher elevation, sprawling live oaks, natural spring water and ādelightful breezes.ā
Sadly, this grand piece of Mobile history barely got the chance to become history.
At about 2 a.m. on March 6, 1906, only 2 short years after it opened, the hotel caught fire while filled with guests from Northern cities. A hotel employee named Lena Gazzam, discovered the fire and helped wake the guests. Everyone escaped, but the Spring Hill Hotel burned to the ground.
It was never rebuilt.
Within a year, advertisements were offering the former hotel grounds for sale as prime property for āhigh-class homes,ā and the land was eventually subdividedā¦which may explain how Iāve lived here my whole life and never knew the hotel even existed!
But thereās another interesting piece of history hiding in this postcardā¦
It was mailed May 6, 1910ā¦ more than four years after the building pictured had burned down.
The writer, Florence, asks her friend Marjorie:
āWhen you went to Mobile, did you see this place?ā
Thereās no way to know how long Florence had owned the postcard, whether cards depicting the long-gone hotel were still being sold, or even when Marjorie had visited Mobile.
But what I love even more is another little piece of Mobile history Florence casually mentions:
āThey let the school out last week here for the soldiersā reunion in Mobile.ā
And then, right alongside that glimpse of a major event happening in Mobile, Florence tells Marjorie that her mama is making dewberry jelly and that they have āa dandy playhouse out under the grape arbor.ā āŗļø
More than a century later, itās those completely ordinary little details that make these old postcards so fascinating to me. š
A grand Spring Hill resort that disappeared after only a few years. A soldiersā reunion important enough for school to be dismissed. Mama making dewberry jelly. Kids playing beneath a grape arbor.
All captured on one little postcard that somehow found its way back to Mobile 116 years later. ā¤ļø
