The Baker Hotel in Mineral Wells was once one of the most opulent hotels in the South. Now, stripped to its bones, the building still shows signs of its former elegance like a former beauty queen who defies the ravages of age.
Recently I toured the restoration project of the grand old lady of Mineral Wells with Mark Rawlings, head of the construction project for the Baker Hotel Development Partners.
A tall, middle-aged, stout Texan, Rawlings has spent the last 30 years doing historic restorations. He has lots of stories about working on the Stephen F. Austin Intercontinental in Austin, the Gunter Hotel and St. Anthony Hotel in San Antonio, the Royal St. Charles in New Orleans, and nearly two dozen other historic properties.
We took the construction elevator attached to the outside of the north wall of the building to the 12th floor and walked up two flights of stairs to the once famous Cloud Room or “Ballroom in the Sky,” as Rawlings called it.
A cavernous room with windows provided a view of the town and surrounding hills. Construction debris was piled along one wall and a fine layer of white dust covered the concrete floor that was once covered with wood flooring. In one corner, a yellow tent is where they sandblast layers of old paint off metal fixtures.
Rejuvenation Begins
When the hotel was finally closed in 1972, the owners just walked away from it, Rawlings said. Once the restoration began in 2019, the first thing to be done was removing old beds and furniture, along with asbestos abatement. What could be reused was saved; piles of trash went to the dump.
Over the last 51 years, the former luxury hotel fell victim to squatters, vandals, and wildlife. “The smell of the bat guano alone would make your eyes water,” Rawlings said.
A consortium of investors paid $2.2 million for the building, but will spend upward of $100 million on the restoration when it’s all said and done, he added. The tri-tower building only cost $1.2 million to build in 1929 ($20 million in 2022 dollars).
Completion dates and costs have shifted several times since the restoration began. The current projection is that the hotel will open as a four-star destination resort, spa, and conference center in spring 2026.
Historic Setting
The town of Mineral Wells, 50 miles west of Fort Worth, was laid out in a wide valley between the tree-covered hills and mesas in 1881. When J.A. Lynch dug a well, it filled with smelly mineral water. According to Lynch, the foul-tasting water cured his rheumatism. By 1885 the town boomed as a health resort. One well with a high concentration of lithium supposedly cured a woman’s dementia, giving the mineral water the nickname of “Crazy Water.” Dehydrated mineral crystals made from the water were shipped around the world.
By the turn of the century, Mineral Wells was a full-blown resort town with hotels, bathhouses, and spas. In 1922, local investors attracted the attention of Texas hotel magnate T.B. Baker, who already owned several grand hotels. The new Baker Hotel was going to be his most magnificent property.
The reinforced concrete building with yellow brick façade, red tile roof, and distinctive bell tower was designed in the Spanish Colonial Revival style by architect Wyatt C. Hedrick, who also designed the Arlington Hotel & Spa in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Using many of the same design elements of the famous bathhouse and spa, the Baker was the first hotel in Texas with an outdoor swimming pool, and it was filled with healthy mineral water.
Wellness Destination
The Baker Hotel opened on Nov. 9, 1929, with 450 rooms. Despite it being the beginning of the Great Depression, the hotel flourished as a health spa and honeymoon destination through the 1930s.
Business at the Baker got a bump when Camp Wolters opened just east of town and became the largest infantry placement during World War II. After the war, business began a steady decline. In the 1940s, modern antibiotics had replaced “taking the waters” on most doctors’ prescription pads.
The beginning of the end started when Earl Baker, T.B. Baker’s nephew who took over the hotel management in 1934, announced that he was going to close the hotel on his 70th birthday in 1963. True to his word, he shuttered the hotel on April 30, 1963, after 34 years. Earl was found unresponsive after a heart attack in the luxurious Baker Suite in 1967, and died in a Mineral Wells hospital at age 74.
A group of local investors leased the hotel for a couple of years, but that ultimately failed even with Fort Wolters reopening as the primary helicopter pilot training base during the Vietnam War. In 1972, the once grand Baker Hotel closed its doors for good.
When Pigs Fly
Over the years, so many groups have tried to bring the hotel back to life that locals started saying the Baker Hotel would reopen when pigs fly. A local coffee shop bought a large metal pig with wings and let patrons sign it for $5.
Rawlings has a sly sense of humor that doesn’t hide his appreciation for the building and his pride in the work that has gone into the restoration. He is the star of a set of YouTube videos about the hotel that he says is the second-most-watched set of hotel restoration videos after a series about the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island in Michigan.
In its heyday, the Baker Hotel was a beautiful building that must have made every guest feel privileged and pampered. It is easy to imagine the opulence that once greeted guests even under the now water-stained ceilings of the grand lobby.
In the basement are shelves of light fixtures, wooden doors, tiles, plaster moldings, and plumbing fixtures waiting to be restored and reused. The grandeur of the former grand old lady is evident in the simplest details.
When it opens, the new Baker Hotel and Spa will have 165 guest rooms and thousands of square feet of meeting space and dance floors. There will be indoor and outdoor mineral baths and the Olympic-size swimming pool will be back in action. Once again Mineral Wells will have its “Capitol” building and be the undisputed “wellness capital of Texas.”
Read about another historic Mineral Wells location, the Crazy Water Hotel, in this week’s “Day Trips” column.
Gerald McLeod has been traveling around Texas and beyond for his “Day Trips” column for more than 25 years. Keep up to date with his journeys on his archive page and follow him on Facebook.
This article appears in October 20 • 2023.
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