Life is good...at the Greenbrier

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Friday, May 21

One of the pleasures of road trips is the excitement of a find that you didn’t expect. Our traipse through AP US History has had us trying to recall so much that we had forgotten - education is wasted on the young - but many of the places and names certainly did ring some familiar bells. But our real find today was a new one - Montpelier, the home of James Madison, outside Charlottesville. We started out Friday morning meandering along a country road lined with the famous Virginia horse farms on our way northeast of Charlottesville - absolutely gorgeous country. Montpelier was the family home of the Madison family - he was born there and died there - and clearly shows how the Virginia aristocracy lived two hundred+ years ago. Until 25 years ago it had been a DuPont estate and was then acquired by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and they have done their usual superb work on the restoration. The exterior restoration was only completed 2 years ago and it has returned the house to the state it was when Madison would have lived there in the early 19th century and the interior renovation is just beginning. It was a wonderful experience to walk through the empty, echoing, beautiful rooms with our guide who brought the home to life with his stories of the Madison family. In James Madison’s second floor study you had a sense of the intellectual capital that worked there - it was in this room that Madison did much of the research for the Constitutional Convention and penned many of the important points included in the final version of the Constitution. The estate has been lovingly restored, including the famous DuPont gardens - wonderful what money can buy. Steve and I walked down to the modest graveyard where James and Dolley Madison are buried - imagine having the grave of one of the founding fathers in your backyard.

I have to comment on the excellent work that the National Trust for Historic Preservation does. Montpelier is a testament to how an important public building can be recaptured for our country. And one of the best parts was the lovely little café in the visitor’s center - all on the honor system - eat first, pay later - and the food was excellent, fresh and healthy. I know that the National Park Service has to set up their food service to feed the hordes, but it does make you wish they could take a leaf out of this type of café.

There’s no direct way from Montpelier to Staunton, VA - our next stop - so I decided to take an unusually indirect way - by taking the bottom third of the Skyline Drive again since it was a glorious afternoon. Seeing the vistas on the drive, with the mountains in the distant sunshine, was well worth turning a 45 minute drive into a 2 hour drive - well, at least I thought so but I won’t vouch for Steve. Isn’t this what a road trip is supposed to be about?

As we’ve been meandering around these parts these past few we’ve been enjoying a wide range of local cuisines…some of which really don’t deserve the term cuisine. I had my first soft shell crab of the season in Charlottesville and then there was Mrs. Rowe’s Restaurant in Staunton. All I can say is that if you’ve ever hankered after real down home Southern cooking, come to Mrs. Rowe’s. The biscuits were meltingly soft, the stuffed green pepper bigger than life…and of course, the salad was made out of what we fondly refer to as “bowling ball lettuce”, e.g. iceberg. Steve made the tough choice to forgo Mrs. Rowe’s famous pie but I could tell it was a hard choice.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, VA and a wonderful local group has worked hard to preserve his birthplace, a modest red brick home that was a parsonage, and create a Woodrow Wilson research center and museum there. The home itself was mildly interesting…he only lived in for the first two years of his life…but as usual we enjoyed our history lesson in the museum and learned a lot about our 28th president. The highlight was his Pierce Arrow limousine which was meticulously restored, right down to the Princeton orange pinstriping. Lunch was one of those small town finds - the Beverly Restaurant - on the main street, filled with wood backed booths, local families, wonderful homemade soup, and a lovely very proper Southern lady proprietor who probably had run the place for 75 years.

We started on the drive to White Sulphur Springs, WV for our night of luxury at the Greenbrier and had some of that amazing West Virginia mountain weather on the drive over. It was coming down in buckets, raining so hard you could barely see at times. However, it is still a gorgeous turning and twisting drive into the heart of the Allegheny Mountains. With the rainy weather we had some of those iconic views of the mountains with the tendrils of cloud poking down into the hollows. Fortunately by the time we arrived, the skies were clearing. When we exited the interstate to turn onto Rt. 60 we quickly went from high speed to low life and were greeted by the obligatory rundown homes, with tilting front porches, crammed with derelict auto seats. Getting to the Greenbrier is quite a drive…as our tour guide the next day said “There are no straight roads in West Virginia.”

The Greenbrier is an incredible institution - it calls itself “America’s Resort” and you can see why. It is reminiscent of a slower way of life and spreads itself over 6,500 acres. The main building is a white confection towering over a narrow valley, and the grounds spread out with four golf courses, pools, summer cottages, tennis…you name it, they have it.

Our room was a riot of Southern decorating, replete with three different floral wallpapers, a walk in closet the size of some motel rooms, a lovely dressing room, and a bathroom with a tub that had a major problem - it was just too long and too big. I sank into the king sized bed and didn’t ever want to get up again from this lap of luxury.

Everything is decorated to the nth degree in fine Dorothy Draper/Carlton Varney style and I just loved it - and you would too if you like to live in a pink and green paradise. The main rooms stretch on and on as far as the eye could see and are replete with silk shaded lamps, towering bouquets of fresh flowers, leather topped writing tables with Greenbrier stationery, a secluded little underground casino - thank heavens there were penny slots there for me - outdoor terraces with rocking chairs and incredible gardens with the rhododendrons (the West Virginia state flower) at the peak of their bloom.

After exploring the hotel, we indulged ourselves in a horse and carriage ride through the grounds - a wonderful way to experience this very special place reminiscent of the way guests would have arrived a century ago. As our two horses clopped through the grounds, you could see the manicured golf courses stretch out and the fly fishing stream rippling by - Steve was jealous. Our afternoon ended with tea on the terrace, enjoying the rocking chairs by the gardens.

You dress for dinner at the Greenbrier and so we did appropriately and made our way to the grand formal dining room, graced with huge crystal chandeliers and lovely tables set with fresh flowers, pink and green service plates, and crisp white napery. So often in a large hotel the food falls short but not here - our meal was absolutely marvelous and even reasonably healthy - of course, one of the best martini’s I’ve ever had made it all the better.

Sunday, May 23, 2010

I couldn’t help but indulge in one of my favorite Sunday morning relaxations - room service breakfast, rolled in on a beautifully set table, replete with the Sunday paper. But the best was yet to come… our bunker tour.

In the late 1950’s the federal government built a 120,000 square foot, hidden underground bunker at the Greenbrier that could serve as the place for both houses of Congress to come in the case of nuclear attack. In 1992, the Washington Post broke the story of the bunker and it was quickly decommissioned by the mid-1990’s with the end of the Cold War. Today the Greenbrier offers tours of this piece of mid-20th century history and it was absolutely fascinating. One of the incredible pieces about it is that it remained a secret for nearly 40 years. The government paid C&O Railroad, the then owner of the Greenbrier, $14 million dollars to not only construct the bunker, starting in 1958 and completed in 1962, but also to build a new wing of the hotel over the bunker to hide its existence and then leased the space back from them - pretty nice deal for C&O. The bunker is hidden under several floors of hotel rooms, but some of the space was utilized as convention display space - with the folks browsing the displays having no idea they were in a secret underground bunker.

We spent 90 minutes on a very well done tour, seeing the 30 ton blast doors that would secure the space in the case of attack, the then state of the art communications center with original telephone switchboard, and examples of the dormitory style beds that would have housed the members of Congress. The bunker remained operational from 1963 to 1992 and was staffed by a secret staff, and supplied by Greenbrier staff over all those years. The bellman who showed us to our room the day before told us that for years he had helped move the boxes of provisions in and out each month, so he was one of the few who knew about the bunker. If you’re interested, there’s lots of fascinating info on the Greenbrier website - no photos for this blog since all electronic devices are still banned in the bunker.

Another rainy, lightening-wracked drive back over the West Virginia hills this afternoon and then up hill and down dale through the Virginia countryside to Poplar Forest, Thomas Jefferson’s country retreat near Lynchburg, VA. Our discovery of Poplar Forest was one of the wonderful serendipitous moments of this trip, as we heard about it from a docent at Montpelier. It is literally out in a cornfield, surrounded by golf courses and suburban development and until recently served as a farmhouse for a local family. As with Woodrow Wilson’s birthplace, a local group took on the challenge to protect and preserve this jewel and is still working at it. You can see the relationship to Monticello at Poplar Forest in the red brick octagonal shape, the large triple hung windows and abundant natural light throughout the home. It is much smaller than Monticello and intimate in its sense. Jefferson often wrote about his time there and said that he used it to get away from the responsibilities and formality of life at Monticello. Our guide, Mrs. Carter Glass III, was one of the original founders of the group that has preserved the site and told us about seeing the building for the first time in 1942 when it was being used as a family farmhouse and barely recognizable as the historic jewel that it is today. Clearly she has made it her life’s work to restore this magnificent place. In much of the building today you can see through to the rough red brick walls so that the sense of the building is spare and simple, unlike Monticello. It has not been finely restored or furnished and in some ways becomes even more redolent of that earlier period.

From the sublime to the right-wing ridiculous, on our way through Lynchburg we were greeted by Jerry Falwell’s huge Liberty University, as we were driving along the road named for him. It is a huge enterprise and as Steve opined, it was a good thing we were driving to the left of this right wing monstrosity.

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Photos

James Madison' Montpelier
Beautifully restored by the National Trust for Historic Preservation

The Greenbrier
Relaxing in the lap of luxury

Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest
Modest but magnificent

Comments

[marty boyer]

So what about the golf??
Only have time to quickly scan your opus, but I saw no mention of the PGA's upcoming visit at Greenbrier -- perhaps we got too enthralled with food news??