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| French Lick Resort historian Jeff Lane pokes around in some of the nooks of the desk of Tom Taggart, who once owned French Lick Springs Hotel in the early 1900s. |
French Lick Springs Hotel is the type of place that’s oozing with history at every turn, to the point where you can casually pass by something (or even walk on it) without realizing its historical significance or backstory.
Fortunately, we’ve got a guy to help with that.
Jeff Lane is the resort’s historian, and as a longtime resident of the area and a retired history teacher at the high school in
town, Springs Valley, Lane is the omniscient authority who’s able to put the
hotel’s history in proper context for you. So we asked Lane to guide us through
various spots in the hotel in a “Walk with the Historian.”
Jeff certainly didn’t disappoint, offering up a menagerie of
info painting a picture of the hotel’s past. So we’re breaking down the Walk
with the Historian into a three-part series, with Jeff detailing two historical
items from the hotel in each installment. We’re starting from the ground up,
beginning today with a look at the intricate lobby floor tiles and the Taggart
desk.
The tiles: It all adds up
Not a whole lot of things survive beyond 100 years, so there’s
some serendipity within the ground you walk on in the French Lick Springs Hotel
lobby.
Way back in the hotel’s earliest days — Lane figures about
1910 or maybe earlier — a network of tiny, circular tiles (and some square ones as well) was laid throughout
the lobby area. Hundreds of thousands of ‘em. Just within the perimeter of each
white square-ish figure that you see below, there are more than 18,000 tiles in eight
different colors. Extend that out across the whole lobby, and the tile count is
astronomical. Especially considering each one was laid by hand.
For a while, the classically styled tile vanished.
When hotel ownership changed in the 1950s and French Lick
Springs Hotel became a Sheraton property, the lobby floor underwent a facelift
in an attempt to modernize the look.
“They covered this entire floor with black and white tile:
glued down,” Lane says.
Needless to say, that sabotaged some of the original mosaic tile
underneath. Another change in ownership prompted the switch back to the
original tiled floor. But, after the pattern of wear-and-tear, some sections of
the floor were missing chunks of tile.
“They thought, ‘OK, where are we going to get tiles to
match?’ They went down in the basement … there were boxes of these original
tiles, still on the property. The same age. So they were able to put back identical
tiles that had been used when the floor was placed originally,” Lane says.
A stunningly fortunate twist, Lane continued, “just to be
able to realize that these were still on the property — nobody had taken them —
and they were just waiting there.”
Enough remained that the damaged or missing tiles were all
filled in — of course, in the same one-by-one fashion as they were originally. “It’s
not like you buy them now – a sheet that’s all connected,” Lane notes.
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| Looking closely at the bottom of the photo, you can see how laying the mosaic tile floor involved cutting some tiles into halves, chunks and slivers for everything to fit. |
And when Lane gazes across the floor, he can’t help but
marvel at both the sum of the parts, as well as the durability throughout the years.
Your eye is naturally drawn up to the other architectural detail and
gold-golded features upon stepping into the lobby, so it stands to reason that
the floor would be an afterthought. But Lane knows better, considering how we’re
following in the same footsteps on the same floor of some pretty notable
people.
“Maybe that’s why I’m a historian, because I just have such
an appreciation…I look at the tiniest detail and I just think, ‘Wow, think of all
the presidents that have been guests here. Or governors. Of course the 1931 Governor’s
Conference,” Lane says, referencing the political gathering where Franklin D.
Roosevelt gathered his party’s support for a presidential bid. “And the
celebrities that have walked on these tiles. They didn’t think anything of it;
may not have realized they were each one placed individually.”
Tom Taggart’s desk
It seems like nothing more than a historically appropriate
accessory. But within the collage of elegant finishings in French Lick’s lobby,
there’s a pretty cool footnote that you’d probably miss if you didn’t know
about it.
“That belonged to Thomas Taggart, who purchased this
property in 1901, and this was his private desk,” Lane said, pointing out the rolltop-style
mahogany desk tucked away in one of the corners. “His family was gracious
enough to see what was going on here (with the hotel’s revival) and knew this
would be safe, and so they gave this to the resort in his honor. So we do have
the official desk of Tom Taggart, which is pretty special.”
Lane speculates that there’s a chance it could be a well-traveled
piece of furniture, too.
“As we know, he was a three-term mayor of Indianapolis, he
was also a U.S. senator for a while. So this could be his desk for any of those
positions that he had. It could have traveled with him.”
What we do know is that Taggart conducted some heavy-duty
business at this desk during his time in French Lick.
After his three mayoral terms in Indianapolis — where he was
responsible for adding parks to the city, which was considered a progressive
initiative at the time — he shifted southward to Orange County with the mission
of bringing a similar innovations to the French Lick property. Within his first
year at the hotel, Taggart spent $200,000 on improvements and eventually
expanded the hotel, adding two stories to the existing three and adorning the
exterior with the trademark yellow French Lick brick that we still see today.
There’s still one mystery of sorts that Lane would love to
uncover about Taggart.
“I would love to know where his private office was here in
the building,” says Jeff, who has a theory about the location.
“The main part of the hotel when he bought it was this front
wing, which was basically the Windsor Hotel. There were three buildings on the
property originally: the Hotel Pavilion, the Hotel Windsor and the Hotel
Clifton. They were not connected due to fire situations: if one building burns,
you don’t burn them all. My guess was his office would have been somewhere in
this main portion of the hotel. I’m guessing maybe one of the rooms down the
corridor (now the spa wing of the hotel), but still pretty close to the front
desk.”
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| Tom Taggart, pictured on the steps leading up to French Lick Springs Hotel, owned the hotel and made several upgrades to it in between his political stints as a three-term mayor of Indianapolis and a U.S. senator. |
In its current discreet location, Taggart’s desk has been displayed
for about the last seven years at the hotel. Some of the hotel’s historical
tours that are given daily touch on the desk; some don’t. Lane wonders if there
should be signage that points it out as a notable relic … but then he reconsiders.
“Or is it best to
just be one of those hidden gems?” Lane postulates. “It’s pretty special, the
way I look at it.”