The casino complex includes three golf courses: the Valley Course, the Hill Course, and the Pete Dye Golf Course at French Lick.īeginning in the early twentieth century, when golf was gaining popularity, the French Lick hotel began to expand its modest golf facilities. In 2008 readers of Condé Nast Traveler ranked the West Baden Springs Hotel twenty-first on its list of the top resorts on the United States mainland. It is also designated as a Historic Civil Engineering Landmark. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974, and became a National Historic Landmark in 1987. It held the title of the largest free-spanning dome in the world from 1902 to 1913, and remained the largest dome in the United States until the completion of the Coliseum in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1955. The new hotel became known for the 200-foot (61 m) dome covering its atrium. The present-day West Baden hotel was built in 1902 (121 years ago) to replace an earlier hotel. The historic, 243-room luxury West Baden Springs Hotel, in the adjacent town of West Baden Springs, 1 mile (1.6 km) from the French Lick Springs Hotel, is also part of the casino resort complex. The restored hotel, with its exteriors of distinctive, buff-colored brick, reopened in 2006. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003. In the 1920s and into the 1930s the resort became known for its recreational sports, most notably golf, but the French Lick area also had a reputation for illegal gambling. Rebuilt and expanded on an even grander scale, especially under the ownership of Thomas Taggart, a former mayor of Indianapolis and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, the popular resort attracted many fashionable, wealthy, and notable guests. Subsequent owners enlarged the original hotel, but it burned in 1897. Bowles built and opened the first hotel on his property around 1845. The hotel catered to guests seeking the advertised healing properties of the town's sulfur springs, three of which were on the hotel's property. The site was originally known as the French Lick Springs Hotel, a grand resort that was a mineral spring health spa.

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