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.
