Native Americans also used the area as hunting grounds. The hotel site was located near a salt lick that wild animals once visited as they traveled along the Buffalo Trace in southern Indiana. The restored hotel, with its exteriors of distinctive, buff-colored brick, reopened in 2006. After a series of subsequent owners and renovations, 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. In the early 1900s, the hotel had a Negro league baseball team, the French Lick Plutos, and until the 1940s French Lick was a venue for spring training for professional baseball teams. The resort was a major employer of African-American labor, which mostly came from Kentucky. Taggart, were its owners and operators, the popular hotel attracted many fashionable, wealthy, and notable guests. During the period 1901 to 1946, when Thomas Taggart, a former mayor of Indianapolis, and his son, Thomas D.

The historic hotel in the national historic district at French Lick was initially known as a mineral spring health spa and for its trademarked Pluto Water. The French Lick Springs Hotel, a part of the French Lick Resort complex, is a major resort hotel in Orange County, Indiana.

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