Yellow Springs

At Dayton, then a cluster of cabins, a settler named Lewis Davis met an Indian newly arrived from the springs, who told him of the water near a branch of the Little Miami. Davis entered the land and settled at the springs, and a tavern and cabins went up to hold the people who came to drink and bathe in water they believed would cure them. The settlement took the spring's name. In its early years Yellow Springs was a health resort before it was a town, sited not by a mill or a road but by a spring people traveled to reach.

The spring runs out of the hillside and leaves a bank of sediment below it, yellow shading to pale red, the iron in the water settling onto the rock. An 1809 account calls the water impregnated with copper, copperas, and iron, with a fall of seventy feet into a hollow, the place nine miles north of Xenia. That iron stain is the whole name. The springs sit in the Little Miami drainage, water on its way to the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Gulf, so the spring that named the town sits at the head of a continental drainage.

In the summer of 1804 a traveler stopped at the springs and wrote down what he found: no village yet, just sick people who had come for the water and a boarding house with a few plain rooms to hold them. He stayed one night. He was told that the store there ran a second trade entirely, that Indians came out of the country in numbers, hundreds across a season, to swap furs and skins for goods. So before it was a town the spring was already a place two peoples traveled to, the sick for the water and the hunters for the store, meeting in the woods nine miles north of Xenia.