J. C. ENGEL, the genial, accommodating and popular proprietor of Montvale Springs, the beautiful and justly famed health resort of the South, is a native of Maryland, and of English origin. He was reared on a farm, and in 1874 married a Miss BOSTAIN, also a native of Maryland. Soon after marriage they moved to Baltimore, where they resided until the spring of 1882, when they took charge of their above mentioned property. It was in 1835 that the Springs attracted attention by the numbers of deer which gathered to use the water.
In 1850 Asa WATSON came from Mississippi to Knoxville badly afflicted with liver and kidney trouble, and drove out to see the medicinal waters, which he used, and was so satisfied that he bought them and erected the main buildings. In a few years he sold to LANIER Bros. & WATT, who kept it until the beginning of the war, then sold it to Joseph L. KING, but since 1882 our subject has been adding to its attractiveness continually.
The Montvale property consists of 4,800 acres, nine miles south of Maryville, in the Chilhowee Mountain Range. The main building, of two stories and seven gables, contains 125 rooms, and about forty cottages also are enclosed in a beautiful lawn of twenty acres, on which are growing sixty rare trees, from Japan, California, etc. Mr. ENGEL has a competent gardener and a four-acre garden, in which he grows all his own vegetables. Two find springs are within a few yards of the hotel, and almost a mile of pipe conveys pure freestone water from the top of the Chilhowee Mountains.
He also owns 400 acres on the Maryville road, three miles distant, including the Black Sulphur Springs, whose water he keeps on draught at the hotel. View Rock, on the top of the mountain, affords a rare view, unequaled by few points in the United States. Maryville can be seen, and Knoxville also, by using the glass. He accommodates from 300 to 500 during the season. He has recently opened two silver mines on the south side of Chilhowee, which promises well.
Source: Goodspeed Publishing Co. History of Tennessee from the Earliest Time to the Present: Together with an Historical and a Biographical Sketch of from Twenty-Five to Thirty Counties of East Tennessee. Chicago: Goodspeed, 1887.