"Sutherland Springs is twenty miles east of San Antonio in northern Wilson County... The settlement by 1860 had a diverse population employed in agriculture, wagon trade along the Goliad Trace and Chihuahua Road that intersected in town, and a steady tourist enterprise focusing on the sulphur springs nearby... Livestock became important, and many families trailed cattle to Mexico or Kansas... The Sutherland Springs Development Corporation, surveyed New Sutherland Springs in 1910, and most businesses in the old town moved to the new site. Patrons from all over the United States and several foreign countries regularly visited the "Saratoga of the South," staying at the fifty-two-room Hotel Sutherland... A disastrous flood in October 1913 destroyed the pools and bathing pavilions, and although Thomas Williams purchased and rebuilt much of the resort, tourism never recovered."