The building which today is known as the Bath House Hotel was in its early days known as the Bath House. The first known use of the term ‘hotel’  is from an advertisement of October 1823.  In the 1840s it was advertised as the ‘Bath House’; in the late 1850s it was described as the Bath-house Hotel, while in the 1880s a visitor called it a ‘hostlery’ and a ‘hotel’ and the smaller, two-storey building below it the ‘bathhouse’.

Popular histories of the island claim that  John Huggins built the ‘Bath Hotel’  in 1778 and that, as ‘the first resort hotel in the Caribbean’, it was visited by Horatio Nelson and the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. New research suggests that John Huggins built the Bath House Hotel several decades later than currently thought. Although neither Nelson nor ST Coleridge were visitors, other well-known travellers did stay at the Bath House Hotel. More importantly, though, other stories have emerged:

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• the spring which prompted the building of the bath house played a role  in Nevis’s early history and in colonising voyages to Virginia and Guyana

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• for the first time it has been recognised that the bath house and the Bath House Hotel would have been built by enslaved people and stands as a testament to their skill

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• an enterprising woman proprietor, Miss Huggins, appears to have been the driving force in trying to attract early overseas visitors to Nevis.

Whenever the buildings were erected, it would have been enslaved people who did most, if not all, of the work. John Huggins had a ready labour force; in 1817 he had in his possession seven males and seven females and a share in another 17 whom he jointly owned with his brother Frederick. In his younger years Frederick Huggins had been a blacksmith30 but went into business as a merchant with his brother John.31 Of the 17 individuals the brothers owned, 16 were men and, with an average age of about 38 years, they would have represented an effective gang of workers.

THE BUILDINGs