October 2, 2013 • 46 mins
Like any grand old hotel, the Grove Park Inn has quite a history, involving real medicine, patent medicine, famous writers and inventors, several wars, and even a ghost story. The luxury spa exists thanks largely to two diseases: malaria and tuberculosis.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am tra c V Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Recently,
I got to spend one entire night at a lovely
(00:22):
historic hotel. Yeah, and you know where that was. I do,
because you brought me back a postcard and I didn't.
We're going to talk about that postcard to day. It's
called the Grove Parking and it's celebrated it's hundredth birthday
on July twelve of this year, which is and like
any grand hotel, uh, it has quite a history. And
(00:44):
this is kind of an across the board weird one
in terms of all the things that it pulls in
because there's real medicine, there's there's patent medicine, they're famous
writers and inventors several wards, even a ghost story. And
I cannot count the number of other podcast episodes in
our archive that in some way high end the history
(01:07):
of the Grove park In. Yeah. And I was actually
surprised at how many people know about it. I know,
this may just be ignorant on my part, Like I
know about it because it's in the South and uh,
you know friends, it's close enough distance that I have friends,
and like, that's a fancy getaway they've done. But when
I posted a picture of the postcard that you sent
me because it made me laugh and was hilarious, like
friends from all over, like, oh is that from the
(01:28):
Grove Park in I love that place, and like how
do you even know about? Yeah? But if many many
more people did, then I would have anticipated yeah. And
and full disclosure, I did work there briefly for some
time ago. It is also situated in my favorite place
in the world, which is Ashville, North Carolina. So we're
gonna talk today about its history, all of the weird
(01:49):
engineering marvels that went into building it, and how strangely
like today the growth working is this luxury resort and
spa with a golf course and this big sports complex
and all kinds of fancy amenities. They're just amenities, it
really is. When I heard that people plan it as
they're like fancy getaway, Like people will do it for
like an anniversary or should there's even a honeymoon or
(02:11):
just you know, one of those we need to treat
ourselves to luxury, right, And they I had a gift
card from when my brother and sister in law got
married that helped us pay the one night that we've
spent there. Um. It was definitely fancy, and but all
of that fanciness started in a weird It started in
a kind of a weird way because we would not
have the Grove park In if there were not too
(02:34):
serious diseases in the world, which are malaria and tuberculosis.
That is not for any humanitarian reason, but we're going
to get into that. Why we have malaria and tuberculosis
to thank for the existence of the Grove park in
this luxury area. So the Grove park In is named
after E. W. Grove, who is the man whose money
(02:56):
helped build the Grove park In and whose name it carries.
Uh And he was born on December twenty three of
eighteen fifty and he was born in a town roughly
sixty miles outside the city of Memphis, and he grew
up on a farm. He moved to Arkansas for a
while and then eventually he moved back to Tennessee, UH
and took on an apprenticeship at a pharmacy in the
(03:17):
town of Paris, Tennessee, which he eventually bought and he
ended up running it himself right, and he wanted to
distinguish himself from all the other pharmacists in the world,
and in the late eighteen hundreds he started on a
plan that he thought might do that, which was to
make a tasteless version of quinine. And that's the medicine
that was used to treat malaria and is notoriously horrible
(03:38):
tasting it. I've never had to take quinine for any
reason either, but I have heard that one of those
things older relatives like to tell you about how horrible
it is if they've ever had to have it. Uh So,
just a brief on malaria. It's a parasitic illness and
it can range from very mild infection to causing fatality.
And on the mile end of the spectrum, you know, uh,
(04:01):
you would experience cycles of feeling cold, hot, sweaty, kind
of like a fluey situation. Yeah, that's sort of the
classic malaria presentation. But if it's not treated, it can
cause respiratory complications, low blood pressure, clotting problems, hypoglycemia, and
all kinds of other effects. And as we said, it
can be fatal. And at this point in history, malaria
(04:22):
was a very real and huge problem in the American South.
Because the land was swampier, there were consequently more mosquitoes, right,
I mean, we still deal with that during the summers.
We do. We're just not dangerous. Actually, I have a
fear of getting malaria, even though it's no longer endemic
in the South, because most of the time when people
get malaria, and like the people still contract malaria in
(04:44):
the United States every year and they don't recognize it.
They don't recognize it. But it's also usually what happens
is someone has traveled to a place where malaria is prevalent,
they've gotten malaria there, brought it back with them, and
then that's been transmitted to somebody else by mosquitoes. So
the reason that I have a fear of getting malaria
is because we live in a city where there's a
major international airport hub and latins. So that that's why
(05:09):
I have that fear. So back then, when there was
a lot of malaria action happening in the American South,
if you got malaria, you pretty much had to take
quinine forever to manage it. There was no other effective
treatment for malaria. And what quinine did was it inhibited
the parasites that caused malaria, and they would bring a
(05:29):
person's fever down, but it didn't actually eradicate the disease.
So if you stopped taking quinine and there were still
malaria parasites in your body, that they could multiply and
the symptoms would come back. And of course taking quinine
forever uh was terrible because, as we mentioned, it was
made from the extremely bitter bark of the Andean Uh
(05:50):
sacona tree and tasted horrible. People would mix it with limitar,
lime or alcohol or almost anything else to try to
make it more palatable because it was really awful to
choke down, right, And that's where tonic water comes from,
and the gin and tonic neither of which are effective
as a treatment or prevention of malaria in any way,
(06:11):
but that that is why we have quinine and tonic water.
So Grove wanted to come up with a better solution
than having this bitter tasting thing that you had to
take for a long time, and his first attempt was
this prescription Druggs named fever LN, and that was quinine
crystals that were suspended in a liquid, and this was
relatively tasteless. It was harder to taste the quinine when
(06:32):
it was suspended in this liquid, but you had to
have a prescription to get it, so it was not
something he could just go in mass market. Yeah, and
then next came so exciting Groves Tasteless Chill Tonic, which
built on that original formula by adding sugar, lemon flavor
and other ingredients. And it wasn't exactly tasteless, but it
(06:54):
did taste better than straight quinine, and it could sold
could be sold over the counter, and it was, and
it did very well, and did extremely well. According to
a particularly delightful advertisement, which is also the postcard I
brought back for Holly um the in the picture of
a pig with a baby face and it's like human
(07:15):
baby's heads, human baby's cartoony baby pig, but I shown
baby face on a pig, and it says that the
tonic quote makes children an adults as fattest pigs. So,
according to this advertisement, it sold one and a half
million bottles in a year. It even claimed to out
sell Coca Cola, although we do not really have hard
sales statistics from that era to go on with that claim.
(07:39):
I love that postcard so much it's it's cooky and weird.
It's just you can't look at it without giggle. I
can't look at it without giggling. And it's like instant
mood lift. So groves Little Pharmacy was not nearly big
enough to support this rapidly climbing popularity of the chill tonic,
so he founded the Paris Medicine Company in eight seven,
(07:59):
and that come and he incorporated in eighteen eighty nine,
and eventually the increasing demand for this product drove him
to move the entire business to St. Louis in so
he would have better access to manufacturing facilities. So, thanks
to improvements in mosquito control and flood control, malaria gradually
started to wane. And this led to two things. And
(08:20):
number one, since people didn't need chill tonic the treat
or prevent malaria anymore, it sort of became marketed as
this cure all and the Paris Medicine Company started diversifying
its company's products that had already started doing this, but
it really kicked that into a higher gear to put
out more kinds of products than just ChIL tonic, some
of which were similarly medically dubious like chill tonic had
(08:46):
an actual purpose, but then it became marketed as the
sort of it will revigorize your blood or something non legitimate.
Same thing with these other products. They weren't quite up
to today's medical standards, will honest, the need for chill
Sonic dropped off. The new flagship product for the company
became Groves Laxative bromo Coinine, which was a tablet that
(09:07):
was billed as the original one day cold cure. It
contained acetanilide, which is an actual drug that the body
will convert into a seat of menafin, so it did
have pharmacologically active ingredients, although acetanilide also has dangerous side effects,
and the claim that the drug would cure colds by
quote opening the bowels and actively killing cold germs was
(09:29):
really pretty bogus. It was not founded in truth. And
you can't see these products and they're packaging and advertisements
because they are on display at the Grove Park in
even today, the part their historical display. I had kind
of forgotten that whole aspect of it until we wandered
around this corner and found the display case of like
wacky clearly not legitimate medical products. Yeah, so this pharmaceutical
(09:54):
venture is how Grove met Fred Loring Seeley, who would
later be instrumental in building the growth park in Seely
worked for pharmaceutical company Parke Davis, and that's the company
that Grove had turned to when he was trying to
perfect his cold tablets. Seely also became groves son in
law when he married Evelyn Grove, who was E. W.
Grove's daughter, and Grove's pharmaceuticals made him an extremely wealthy man,
(10:18):
but his life had its share of hardships. It was
not all easy going. His first wife died in eight four,
and three of the four children they had had together
died in infancy, and his daughter, Evelyn was the only
one that survived. He did remarry and he had two
more children, one of whom died of diphtheria when she
was very very young. He also worked really hard to
(10:39):
make this fortune. He worked himself into exhaustion and he
developed chronic ron caius and that prompted his doctor's to
tell him to spend some of each year recovering his
health in Asheville, North Carolina, and at one point they
told him that he just needed to stay in Asheville
until further notice, and so at this point Seely took
over running a lot of pharmaceutical business, and Grove while
(11:02):
he was recovering, started buying lots of property in Asheville.
As his health got better, he started developing real estate
in Asheville and in Atlanta. And so the Grove park
In is one of the many, many properties in Asheville
and Atlanta that Seely or Grove or both of them
had a hand in developing. And so that is the
malaria element of how his fortune was made. And leading
(11:25):
up to the Grove park In, we are now moving
into the tuberculosis portion podcast. We talked about tuberculosis a
lot on this podcast lately. It really has come up
over and over, even when we select topics that we
think are in no way related to tuberculosis. It was
just pop up in the research somewhere. Um, but this
one is really there's a lot of tuberculosis elements to
talk about. Uh So, during this era, Ashville was struggling
(11:49):
with whether it should be a tourist destination or more
of a health destination for people recovering from illnesses, and
either could have been lucrative for the city. And it
was really easily suited to cover both of those bases.
It's in a beautiful part of the Blue Ridge Mountains,
and it has relatively mild winters thanks to being surrounded
by all those mountains. It's kind of kind of bowl. Yeah,
(12:11):
it kind of closes it off from some of the
harsher weather that could move in a lot of snow
and stuff kind of goes around instead of hitting Ashville directly.
So in particular, areas like Asheville were increasingly home to
tuberculosis sanatoriums. So in those years before the discovery of streptomycin,
the treatment for tuberculosis was really centered on rest and
(12:32):
nutritious food and breathing some kind of air that people
thought was wholesome in some way. And Mountain Air was
on like the Good Air List of the good types
of air that maybe would help you fight off tuberculosis.
And so this part of North Carolina had already become
home to tuberculosis sanatoriums, and recovery in one of these
(12:52):
sanatoriums took a really long time. Sometimes people would stay
there for months and months. My grandmother actually stayed at
one in Black Mountain, North Carolina, which is a little
bit east of Asheville when she was a child. But
bringing in sanatoriums had the potential to also drive away
residents who were fearful for their own health. Having a
bunch of people with tuberculosis move in could be a
(13:14):
little unsettling. Somebody that was hale and hardy did not
really want to risk exposure, especially since the only treatment,
which was like a lot of people died of tuberculosis,
and the only treatment was like this month's long stay
being you know, cared for and resting and eating wholesome food,
like it could really take months and months up to
(13:35):
a year sometimes. Yeah, And so this fear of the
residents was part of why Grove bought four eight acres
of land, including part of the western slope of Sunset Mountain,
in nine and it was both an investment in land
and a protection of the value of the other property
that he already owned. He bought it in part so
(13:55):
that no one would buy it and build a sanitorium there.
He said so in a letter to Ceiley about two
months after the sale was completed. No, we're not speculating
on that motive. You straight up said, I don't want
I don't want anybody to build a sanatorium here. Later on,
he also had the habit of buying tuberculosis sanatoriums when
they went up for sale and tearing them down, or
(14:17):
when he had property of his own to sell, he
would put this no sanatoriums clause in the sales documentation.
He was really not in favor. Yeah, he was systematically
trying to rid Asheville of the tuberculosis sanatoriums. Yeah, by
using his his well out as a real estate purchaser
(14:40):
and holder. So now let's get back to when E. W.
Grove finally decided to put a hotel on this giant
tract of land he had bought. Yeah, he wasn't uh
really on top of that idea that he didn't jump
on the thought of building an inn there right away,
And in fact, the first time an investor came to
him with that idea, he turned them down. But by
(15:01):
nineteen eleven he had started to envision this beautiful hotel
on the slope of the mountain that he had bought.
And he and Seely had gone their separate ways for
a little while after an apparent disagreement over how to
run Paris Pharmaceuticals. This is a recurring theme in their
relationship they had lots of disagreements on how to run things.
In the meantime, Seely had gone to Atlanta to start
(15:22):
a newspaper that was called The Atlanta Georgian. But by
nineteen eleven Seeli Seely was back in Asheville, shopping around
for an architect for the inn and working from photos
of the similarly rustic Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone as
an inspiration. A number of architects and designers submitted proposals
for the hotel, but Grove was not really happy with
(15:44):
any of them. Henry Ives Cob of New York did
submit a plan that looked somewhat like what the Grove
park in ultimately ended up looking like, uh, using rough
gray boulders and a red roof, And in the end
it was Seely himself and not an architect, Hughes mine
what the hotel would look like. He came up with
a sketch that Grove liked, and in turn Grove put
(16:05):
him in charge of the project, working with Cobb, and
gave him a salary and thirteen acres of land to
build a home on, and they selected a site on
the slope of the mountain, and it was one that
had a great view, but it was off the ridge
so it would be less affected by snow than other positions.
And it was also near the actual country club, which
already had its own golf course, so they were hoping
(16:27):
the guests would be able to use that as well.
Like that they could work on a partnership deal. So
we already mentioned that Feely and Grove often did not
work well together. Seely and Cobb did not work well
together either, and ultimately Cobb was dismissed from the project,
and this left Seely free to work directly with JW. Mckibbon,
who was an architectural engineer and construction supervisor John Oscar Mills,
(16:50):
who Grove had worked with previously on some developments in Atlanta,
and they wrote ground on July nine, with the plan
of opening the following July first, which almost happened. That's
a tight build schedule. It's an extremely especially considering the
scope of what they were doing and the technology available
at the time, and building on the slope of a mountain,
Building on the slope of a mountain where weather happens,
(17:13):
even though it is relatively mild. Yeah, it's not a
lot of time to try to build a whole hotel. Yeah,
considering when it was built. Uh, that hotel and its
construction was really an engineering feat. The only typical thing
about it was the excavation. Uh. They used a steam shovel,
although they were only able to use one. One steam
shovel did the whole. The exterior was built with local
(17:36):
granite stones from surrounding mountains and some of them weighed
many many tons individually and these were hauled to the
site primarily using mules and wagons. A lot of these
wagons actually came from Asheville's T. S. Morrison and Company,
which ran from to two thousand and six. It was
very sad when it closed down very recent It had
(17:57):
gone from being the kind of place where you know,
the local farmers and and people would buy all their
general supplies to the sort of touristy kind of place
that uh cells nostalgia the form of like wind up
ten toys and stuff. And then it just wasn't sustaining.
I guess. Yeah, there were changes to downtown. It didn't
it didn't survive anymore, and they I think the owners
were ready to retire, but back to this construction project,
(18:20):
so they had to get these rocks up to the site,
and to do it, about fourteen wagons would be connected
together to form a train, and a packard truck then
towed them up the mountain. And this sounds really primitive,
but it was actually pretty effective. It could move forty
tons of rock with each load, and it was an
impressive enough engineering feat that it was actually featured in
(18:41):
national publications at the time. So they were able to
leverage power, the power of the truck and use the
load bearing of the wagons in a way that made
doable unique and really uh in the end enabled the
construction of the facility. Yeah, Italian stonemason's cut and shaped
the st owns to fit together, but they left they
(19:01):
left all of the visible faces of the stones natural.
So when you look at the h the walls that
are made of these stones, they have a very rough
hewn look. They look like boulders just stacked up together
to make a hotel. But in fact, on the backside
their cut to fit. Yeah, that's cool. On the inside,
they fit together. The hair doesn't come in. About four
dred men did the work of fitting those stones together
(19:23):
and doing all the interior work. Some of the workers
were local, but Mills also brought some of them with
him from Atlanta, and those sort of displaced workers that
were there from Atlanta were housed in a circus tent.
Just kind of another weird and wonderful factoid about GPS
the roofs. There were five different roofs that it took
to cover the whole in and they were made to
(19:46):
be fireproof. At this point in history, hotel fires were
a huge problem in terms of both monetary cost and
the cost of human life. Uh often fires and hotels
were huge and had a lot of fatalities. Plus, thanks
to its location up on the side of this mountain,
in the lack of today's firefighting equipment, if the Grove
(20:06):
park In had caught fire early in its history, it
probably would have been a total loss. There wouldn't have
been much they could do about it. So their whole
goal was to make it so that it would be
as fire resistant as possible. So they made these five
roofs to cover all the parts of the hotel with
a solid layer of concrete that was poured over forms
and supports, and the poor went on continually twenty four
(20:28):
hours a day until they were done, so there wouldn't
be any steams for water to leak through. It's kind
of ingenious, but also seems like the hard way, Like
there's part of it and I know you know only
nominal amounts about construction, but there's part of me it's like,
couldn't they have figured out an easier way? But I
don't know. Once all that concrete cured, though, the whole
(20:51):
thing was sealed, and then they put a layer of
timbers and roofing felt uh, and then the distinctive red
tile roof topped it all off, and that meant there
was there while this was this layer of wood. It
was like green timbers that wouldn't burn as well, and
there was this huge layer of concrete between them and
other would like a firewall. So another unique bit of
(21:15):
the way the hotel was constructed is that the elevators
and the historic part of the end are built inside
the fireplaces. Purportedly, this was to shield guests from the noise.
So if they're not in the fire part of the fireplaces,
they're kind of behind that part in the huge stone
walls of the fireplaces. So when you want to take
(21:36):
the elevator, you go and stand in this little alcove
that is adjacent to the fireplace. The strange historic elevator
comes and takes you up to your room. That's very fascinating.
I haven't been, so I'm trying to picture it. It's
hard to picture, and it's hard enough to picture even
if you were staying there, Like do I walk through
(21:56):
the fire Yeah, we would be waiting for the elevator
and people would come and be like for the fire
elevator that is inside the fireplace. The fireplaces are enormous
and beautiful. You could walk right in, you could, yeah. Uh.
Much of the furnishings and the fixtures there came from
(22:16):
Roycroft Community, which is an arts and crafts community in
New York. And the arts and crafts movement started in
England and the Victorian era in part as a response
to the Industrial Revolution. Uh. And it drew heavily from
the writings of John Ruskin and William Morris, and it
combined workmanship and handcrafting with this thread of anti industrial sentiment.
There wasn't one set type of design to it, but
(22:38):
there was a lot of emphasis on simplicity, on skill,
and on quality. Uh. And as a testament to how
those ideals have held up, there are many of the
original Roycroft pieces and other arts and Craft's antiques still
in use at the Grove Park in so they have
lasted more than a hundred years. UH. And in the
US UH, the arts and crafts movement is also called
(22:59):
them mission style, So if you hear someone referred to
mission style stuff. Second, as a side note to our
podcast archives, the Chicago Arts and Craft Society started at
Hull House, so if you listen to Jane Adams episode,
it's all tied together. So the Great Hall, which is
basically the lobby of the hotel, had a rough hewn
(23:21):
local granite interior that matched the exterior of the building,
with huge support pillars in the center and then immense
fireplaces on either end. And there are quotes from famous
authors and philosophers inscribed in various stones around the hall.
And as Tracy hinted at earlier, they did not quite
make their July first deadline for opening. The opening banquet
(23:44):
was actually held on July twelfth, nine with about four
hundred guests, including then Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan,
who included in his address the quote, today we stand
in this wonderful hotel not built for a few but
for the multitudes that will come and go. I congratulate
these men they have built for the ages. I think
it's a lovely sentiment. And on that note, how about
(24:07):
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And now we will get back to what happened at
the end once it opened. So things went pretty well
for the Growth park Ends first year. It looked like
(26:42):
the hotel was going to be a huge success, but
then reality intervened and on Joe Archduke Ferninand of Austria
was assassinated and World War One soon followed. In the end,
the war years were really financially precarious for the Grove
park In. That is not surprising in any way. It
(27:03):
did manage to stay open, although it was not always
profitable during that time. But after World War One ended,
the Grove park In became a popular destination for the
well off, and many of its guests were there for
lengthy days of rejuvenation and relaxation, so that Mountain Air
was considered healthy for many reasons, not just to cure
(27:24):
a specific disease, but it was generally, you know, considered
a healthful place to spend some time. Yeah. Ashville still
has that reputation. Yeah, And after ongoing disputes with Grove Seeley,
uh leased the hotel from him and took over its
management and established it as a place where businessmen, businessmen
and perhaps their wives but preferably not their children could
(27:44):
come to rest and recuperate from the strain of their lives.
They kept it meticulously, meticulously clean. There was a lot
of effort put into keeping the place absolutely spotless, and
they also served what they considered to be wholesome food.
But it was also clearly not for sick people. There
(28:05):
was a lot of focus in those earlier years about
how this was about a place to come and you know,
refresh yourself if you've been having some chronic insomnia or
you're stressed out all the time. But it was not
intended for sick people, which they That was clearly stated
often and it did not want that association. Um At
(28:27):
the same time, though for the first few years of
its operation, people would check into their room and find
a bottle of Groves tasteless chill tonic and a shot
glass on the bedside table of each room. Um. So, well,
it was not for sick people or little people are children.
They wanted to keep it a quiet place for adults
to just relax, to relax. They were they were making
(28:50):
it a spa calling it that. Yet yeah, that one
of the people who was a visitor here. Another another
podcast connection is John Harvey Kellogg. Um, it did have
some of the same elements as the Battle Creek Uh
facility that John Harvey Kellogg was running, but with not
nearly as heavy an emphasis on all of the various
(29:12):
pseudo medical treatments that John Harvey Kellogg had going on there.
So the relationship between Celely and Grove we have mentioned
was always um a little adversarial and head buddy. But
it fell apart completely after more than twenty years when
Grove basically wrote Seeley out of his will and he
even tied up Evelyn's own inheritance that was his daughter
who was married to Seeley, so that she couldn't leave
(29:34):
any of her inheritance from Grove to Seeley if she
died before her husband did. Groves Will also made it
very clear that he wanted Seeley out of Grove Park.
So after Seeley's lease on the hotel was up, he
was just going to have to go. There would be
no renewal. Yeah, As for what caused this rift, I
don't think there was any one thing. They were both
extremely particular and extremely exact and very determined. So if
(29:58):
each of them set their mom mind to something different,
they didn't agree on what they had, you know, set
their minds on, they would really quickly start to just
go head to head over it. Plus, each of them
seemed to be kind of jealous of the other's relationship
with Evelyn. It's such sad uh in n Seely's least ended.
(30:19):
And in that same year E. W. Grove died, So
Seeli ended his work at the Grove Park on the
eve of the Great Depression, and he turned his attention
to other businesses he'd started, including woodworking and textile manufacturing,
including built more industries. So, even though groves Will had
specified very clearly that his Asheville holdings were not to
(30:41):
be sold in a whole or in part, soon after
all this happened, his son, who was E. W. Grove Jr.
And the hotels general manager, William Curran, decided eventually not
long after this happened, to sell it. They did find
a buyer, but the End fell on really hard times
almost right away and wound up to fall saying on
both of its mortgages during the Great Depression, and the
(31:03):
history of the Grove varies a lot for the next
couple of decades. For a few months during World War Two,
the End was an internment facility UH and the first
group of people interned there were diplomats from Hungary, Bulgaria
and Italy, and as these diplomats were released, they were
then replaced with German and Japanese internees. So during this
(31:23):
time the only guests of the Crow Partner were people
that were forced to be there. They were not they
were prisoners. And when it when it was more of
a diplomatic facility, the security was a lot more lax
than once it was a German and Japanese internees. Those
generally were not diplomats, they were regular people who were
being interned because of where they were from or where
(31:46):
their families were from. So then beginning in October of
nineteen forty two, the growth Park started to house injured
seamen from the U. S. Navy. This went on until
the spring of nine, and then in nineteen forty four
it became one of distribution centers for United States soldiers
returning from combat during World War Two. So returning soldiers
would get a furlough to go visit their homes and families,
(32:08):
and then they'd spend up to fourteen days and the
distribution centers getting physical exams, filling out paperwork, that kind
of thing. And also in nineteen forty four, for around
a month, Philippine president in exile Manuel el Quizon also
temporarily ran the government from the Grove Park in After
World War Two, once it was functioning as an inn
(32:31):
again rather than all of these other roles it had
taken on during the war, the end really started to
show its age. It gradually fell into disrepair and it
went through a series of owners and managers until it
was bought by an entrepreneur named Charles A. Salmon's in
nineteen fifty five. Salmon's invested in renovations and modernization, and
it was a project so big that the hotel closed
(32:53):
for the winter to get it all done. The goal
of this was to end quote modernize, so many of
the original furnishings and fixtures were altered or replaced since
at this point Arts and Crafts, dick Core and the
whole look that it had been put in was really
out of favor. So when the growth Park reopened, it
(33:13):
was as a seasonal resort that had a very fifties
look and feel, and there was even a newly built
motor lodge on the property, and Salmon's continued to add
on to the facility and remodel it over the years.
He bought the golf course from the Country Club of
Asheville that they had specifically placed it in close proximity
to back when they chose the lot, so then uh
(33:36):
without a golf course. The Country Club of Ashville then
bought another golf course that had recently been put up
for sale and that all went down in After the
death of his first wife, Charles Salmon's later married a
woman named Elaine who had a lot of experience in
hotel management. She had some ideas about what to do
with the Grove Park in and it was she who
(33:56):
convinced her husband to really restore the hotel to its
historic splendor and get rid of all the fifties era
motor lodge trappings that had been modernized into it. She
also thought the hotel was going to need space for
meetings and conferences to be able to stay competitive, but
they would really have to put all of those elements
in in a way that matched the rest of the
(34:17):
historic hotel. And this massive multimillion dollar effort all started
in ninety eight and it essentially was ongoing throughout the
nineteen eighties. It involved demolition of previous editions that had
grown dated, a total renovation of the whole property, and
construction of two new wings, the Salmons and the Vanderbilt Wings.
Great pains were taken to modernize while still keeping the
(34:41):
historic feel. So while the facilities were modern, the look
of it was historic. Uh. And they even went right
down to using period appropriate color palettes in the historic rooms.
So for the decor, Elaine Salmon's bought an extensive collection
of arts and crafts antiques. Yeah, some of the stuff
that they still had and had in storage brought out.
Then she also bought new stuff that was really old stuff.
(35:04):
When Charles Sammons died in his financial advisers really tried
to convince his wife to sell the hotel. They had
bought several hotels over the years, and they had gotten
you know buyers for most of them, but they had
held onto the growth park in She refused, and what
she wanted to do was to make it a world
class resort and spa, so she kept pouring more money
(35:25):
into restoring and refurbishing the historic main inn in n
the palm courts and the historic main inn was restored
to how it had looked in thirteen and this even
included meticulously removing layers and layers of old paint and
then using photographs of the original area and comparing it
to what they had on earth so that they could
replicate the centil work that had been done in the
(35:48):
original decor uh. The entire roof, including the concrete layer,
was replaced in nine after leaking became a problem, and
it was replaced with clay tile to look exactly like
the original. Construction of a spa started in and it
was built almost entirely underground so it wouldn't block the
view from the hotel. The spot opened in two thousand
(36:11):
one and in two thousand two, the golf course was
restored to its original design, which had been done by
golf course designer Donald Ross. Elaine Salmons died in two
thousand nine, and there wasn't really anyone in the Salmon's
family who wanted to take up the hotel and its operations.
She had clearly been very devoted to She was extremely
to be hard to find anybody to fill her when
(36:33):
I was working there. She was still living when I
was working there, and when she would visit the hotel,
we all had to be extra extra. We had to
be on the ball all the time. We had to
be exceptionally on the ball. MS Salmon's was on the property,
of course. Uh So the property was purchased by KSL
Resorts in and it is now the Omnigrove Park. Yeah,
(36:57):
that is very recent. So because this hotel has been
around so long and has had just so much of
a great history, there are many many prominent guests who
have visited there at some point in another. There are
so many presidents and diplomats, famous entertainers like Harry Houdini
also the subject of a prior podcast, and many prominent
(37:19):
industrialists from earlier eras of American history. William Howard Taft
stayed for a time before his death in nineteen thirties
he tried to recover from heart disease. Both Franklin d
and Eleanor Roosevelt visited separately, and as part of a
side note, Ceely and his wife Evelyn, who as we
said was groves daughter, met Herbert Hoover and his wife
(37:40):
lou in China, and all four of them narrowly escaped
the Boxer rebellion adventures with Grove and Seely. Henry Ford,
Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone were all fond of the
inn and they would actually hang out there together. They're
even pictures on display of the three of them outside
the inn after a camping trip that are still displayed
(38:02):
in the hotel. And many of these, uh you know,
sort of notable characters were people that Seeley had met
during his newspaper days. And one of the most well
known long term guests and also the topic of a
past history podcast was f Scott Fitzgerald, and he stayed
for months at a time in the mid thirties. At
(38:23):
first this was for the sake of his own health,
and then later it was to be near Zelda, who
was hospitalized for mental illness at Highland Hospital in Nashville,
and that's where she later tragically died in a fire.
Uh More recently, President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama
have visited, and the golf clubs and basketball that he
played with while he was there are on display. We
(38:43):
were just kind of funny. Yeah, we we were giggling
over that because we kept finding the displays that were
like and then when pere's the President Barack Obama was here,
here are the golf clubs that he played with. Here's
the basketball that he played with. There are many things
that many famous people had at them or where there
aren't around the hoell um so recent I think that's
(39:04):
probably why it's funny. It was very funny to me.
Um there there are walls of pictures of all kinds
of notable figures, including many past presidents of many political affiliations.
So it is not just that makes it funny, so
funny too. It would be like if you left the
studio and I took a piece of paper you had
written a note on, and I was like, here, Tracy
(39:26):
Wilson wrote a note, except I'm not president uh, and
then uh to wrap up tell us the ghosts ghost story. So, yes,
all good old inns have a ghost story, and the
one at the Grove Park is the Pink Lady. The
story goes that the Pink Lee is a woman who
fell to her death from one of the upper floors
(39:48):
of the Palm Court. So the Palm Court is sort
of the central room area of the historic and it's
built like an atrium, and so the rooms are around
the side and there's a long drop down into the
bottom if you're on one of the upper floors. So allegedly,
sometime during the nineteen twenties, a woman fell from one
of these upper floors and died, although we're not really
(40:09):
sure who this might have been. Um Now she is
said to haunt room five forty five, although in a
very friendly way. Everyone describes her as a you know,
a benevolent ghost who is playful and likes children, not
a nice creepy way like the previous errors of the
inn where they ask guests to not bring your children
(40:29):
and bring your kids. He's okay with it now. It
is fine to bring children to the Grove Park. There
are no signs everywhere about how you had better not
be a sick person if you were coming to stay there.
Um that the whole Now, it's definitely you know, a
nice place for people and families to come and take
a visit, uh with lots of gracious people. I'm not
trying to sound like an ad for them, but I
(40:51):
felt that to be true while I worked there, and
I felt that to be true recently when I got
to stay there. I wonder if many many people request five, Well,
they don't really announce this is the haunted room. You
can find that on the internet though that a lot
of the rooms in the historic main Inn have little
(41:12):
labels on them of like the famous historical person that
stayed in that room, especially if the person stayed there
for a really long time. Uh So, the room that
we got to stay in was just down the hall
from the suite of the suite of rooms that f
Scott Fitzgerald stayed in, which was kind of I found
that to be kind of cool. We pretty much the
whole time we were there, when we were not eating food,
(41:34):
we were wandering around the hotel looking at all of
these historical things. Because even though I worked there for
two years, I didn't get to you know, walk around
and look at historical from the case of the employees,
are really cool places. Never get to appreciate those places.
I was underground. So um, if you were interested in
all of this, uh, there is a book by Bruce
Johnson called Built for the Ages, A History of the
(41:55):
Grove Park in that includes just pages and pages of
historical photograph the whole thing being built. Um, all kinds
of interesting facts about the history of the hotel that
we did not go into here. It's it's basically from
start to finish, the whole thing lovely, lovely black and
white pictures of people in there, you know, twenties attire,
(42:15):
hanging out with the Grove Park. So, yes, that is
the Grove Park. If I were an extremely rich person,
you would go there frequently. I would, But I am not,
and so go there. I go there on the generosity
of other people. I did get to stay there when
I was working there one time because I I won
(42:35):
a stay at the holiday party. That's a big deal. Okay,
So I have some listener mail. Correctly you share it,
I will. This is from Gregory. Gregory says Holly and Tracy. Hi,
I'm a big fan of your podcast. You both make
my commute to and from work much more bearable. Thank you, Greg,
actually says Greg at the bottom, so I actually call
(42:57):
him Greg. I also listened to your show all Right
Around with my four year old son Thor. We were
recently listening to your episode about the Flannon Aisle lighthouse disappearance,
and he has been talking about it ever since. We
talked about it all of the time, and he keeps
coming up with his own theories about what happened to
the three workers. Here are a few that he asked
(43:17):
me to submit for your consideration. The workers met some
mermaids and went to live with them. I think that
sounds fun a und of that breathing problem. It sounds
like a great way to go. We'll just get the
sea witch to take care of that for us, an
exchange for something that makes us crucially individual with I
was singing in the Futurama solution which is non delightful.
That seemed to work. O we could we could have
(43:38):
gilly weed from Herry Potter. Yeah, there are options, so
back it's growing sla. The next choice was less delightful.
A sea monster at them. Well yeah, and then the
next one is a mummy took them. Huh. Seafery mummies
not so well known, but I'm not willing to rule
it out. Well, if if they had proper, you know,
(44:00):
desiccant on board, they could probably deal with that. And
then my personal favorite, someone dressed up as a mummy
or a werewolf or a sea monster and kidnapped them
and then he hasn't got the seas. Thor is also
a fan of Scooby Doo. Thanks for making a great
show and for giving my son and I have something
to talk about. Greg. This is seriously one of the
most delightful. Thank you Thor for having these wonderful ideas
(44:26):
about the plan and I'll lighthouse and thank you Greg
for sharing them with us. That's how history semesteries are solved,
first brain storming possibilities and then seeing how they could
have played out well. And I love the idea of
of of parents and kids talking about whatever they've been
listening to her watching. I remember when I was a kid,
my mom and I would go to the movies. One
(44:47):
of my favorite things was apt in the movie talking
to my mom about a movie. M Yeah, we would
do that on the way home. It was just me
and my mom. For some reason, my brother I guess
would be camping with my dad or something. I don't know.
I don't remember my brother being president during this talk, right,
did have one? I do have one? My brother is
(45:07):
in the present tense. I should thank him again for
contributing to your stay and helping make it a feasible
for us to spend a night there. So, okay, if
you would like to write to us, there are so
many ways you can do so. We are at History
Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook at
facebook dot com slash history class stuff, and on Twitter
(45:29):
at missed in History. Our tumbler is at missed in
History dot tumbler dot com. And after we're done here,
I'm gonna go pen a bunch of group park and
stuff on pinteres. If you would like to learn a
little more of the kookier side of what we talked
about today, go to our website and put the word
Ashville in the search bar. You will find an article
(45:50):
called how the five day weekend works, which, if you
know anything about Asheville, it is not surprising at all
that that idea originated. There. You can learn a whole
lot more about that and many many other subjects at
our website, which is how stuff works dot com for
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(46:12):
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am tra c V Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Recently,
I got to spend one entire night at a lovely
(00:22):
historic hotel. Yeah, and you know where that was. I do,
because you brought me back a postcard and I didn't.
We're going to talk about that postcard to day. It's
called the Grove Parking and it's celebrated it's hundredth birthday
on July twelve of this year, which is and like
any grand hotel, uh, it has quite a history. And
(00:44):
this is kind of an across the board weird one
in terms of all the things that it pulls in
because there's real medicine, there's there's patent medicine, they're famous
writers and inventors several wards, even a ghost story. And
I cannot count the number of other podcast episodes in
our archive that in some way high end the history
(01:07):
of the Grove park In. Yeah. And I was actually
surprised at how many people know about it. I know,
this may just be ignorant on my part, Like I
know about it because it's in the South and uh,
you know friends, it's close enough distance that I have friends,
and like, that's a fancy getaway they've done. But when
I posted a picture of the postcard that you sent
me because it made me laugh and was hilarious, like
friends from all over, like, oh is that from the
(01:28):
Grove Park in I love that place, and like how
do you even know about? Yeah? But if many many
more people did, then I would have anticipated yeah. And
and full disclosure, I did work there briefly for some
time ago. It is also situated in my favorite place
in the world, which is Ashville, North Carolina. So we're
gonna talk today about its history, all of the weird
(01:49):
engineering marvels that went into building it, and how strangely
like today the growth working is this luxury resort and
spa with a golf course and this big sports complex
and all kinds of fancy amenities. They're just amenities, it
really is. When I heard that people plan it as
they're like fancy getaway, Like people will do it for
like an anniversary or should there's even a honeymoon or
(02:11):
just you know, one of those we need to treat
ourselves to luxury, right, And they I had a gift
card from when my brother and sister in law got
married that helped us pay the one night that we've
spent there. Um. It was definitely fancy, and but all
of that fanciness started in a weird It started in
a kind of a weird way because we would not
have the Grove park In if there were not too
(02:34):
serious diseases in the world, which are malaria and tuberculosis.
That is not for any humanitarian reason, but we're going
to get into that. Why we have malaria and tuberculosis
to thank for the existence of the Grove park in
this luxury area. So the Grove park In is named
after E. W. Grove, who is the man whose money
(02:56):
helped build the Grove park In and whose name it carries.
Uh And he was born on December twenty three of
eighteen fifty and he was born in a town roughly
sixty miles outside the city of Memphis, and he grew
up on a farm. He moved to Arkansas for a
while and then eventually he moved back to Tennessee, UH
and took on an apprenticeship at a pharmacy in the
(03:17):
town of Paris, Tennessee, which he eventually bought and he
ended up running it himself right, and he wanted to
distinguish himself from all the other pharmacists in the world,
and in the late eighteen hundreds he started on a
plan that he thought might do that, which was to
make a tasteless version of quinine. And that's the medicine
that was used to treat malaria and is notoriously horrible
(03:38):
tasting it. I've never had to take quinine for any
reason either, but I have heard that one of those
things older relatives like to tell you about how horrible
it is if they've ever had to have it. Uh So,
just a brief on malaria. It's a parasitic illness and
it can range from very mild infection to causing fatality.
And on the mile end of the spectrum, you know, uh,
(04:01):
you would experience cycles of feeling cold, hot, sweaty, kind
of like a fluey situation. Yeah, that's sort of the
classic malaria presentation. But if it's not treated, it can
cause respiratory complications, low blood pressure, clotting problems, hypoglycemia, and
all kinds of other effects. And as we said, it
can be fatal. And at this point in history, malaria
(04:22):
was a very real and huge problem in the American South.
Because the land was swampier, there were consequently more mosquitoes, right,
I mean, we still deal with that during the summers.
We do. We're just not dangerous. Actually, I have a
fear of getting malaria, even though it's no longer endemic
in the South, because most of the time when people
get malaria, and like the people still contract malaria in
(04:44):
the United States every year and they don't recognize it.
They don't recognize it. But it's also usually what happens
is someone has traveled to a place where malaria is prevalent,
they've gotten malaria there, brought it back with them, and
then that's been transmitted to somebody else by mosquitoes. So
the reason that I have a fear of getting malaria
is because we live in a city where there's a
major international airport hub and latins. So that that's why
(05:09):
I have that fear. So back then, when there was
a lot of malaria action happening in the American South,
if you got malaria, you pretty much had to take
quinine forever to manage it. There was no other effective
treatment for malaria. And what quinine did was it inhibited
the parasites that caused malaria, and they would bring a
(05:29):
person's fever down, but it didn't actually eradicate the disease.
So if you stopped taking quinine and there were still
malaria parasites in your body, that they could multiply and
the symptoms would come back. And of course taking quinine
forever uh was terrible because, as we mentioned, it was
made from the extremely bitter bark of the Andean Uh
(05:50):
sacona tree and tasted horrible. People would mix it with limitar,
lime or alcohol or almost anything else to try to
make it more palatable because it was really awful to
choke down, right, And that's where tonic water comes from,
and the gin and tonic neither of which are effective
as a treatment or prevention of malaria in any way,
(06:11):
but that that is why we have quinine and tonic water.
So Grove wanted to come up with a better solution
than having this bitter tasting thing that you had to
take for a long time, and his first attempt was
this prescription Druggs named fever LN, and that was quinine
crystals that were suspended in a liquid, and this was
relatively tasteless. It was harder to taste the quinine when
(06:32):
it was suspended in this liquid, but you had to
have a prescription to get it, so it was not
something he could just go in mass market. Yeah, and
then next came so exciting Groves Tasteless Chill Tonic, which
built on that original formula by adding sugar, lemon flavor
and other ingredients. And it wasn't exactly tasteless, but it
(06:54):
did taste better than straight quinine, and it could sold
could be sold over the counter, and it was, and
it did very well, and did extremely well. According to
a particularly delightful advertisement, which is also the postcard I
brought back for Holly um the in the picture of
a pig with a baby face and it's like human
(07:15):
baby's heads, human baby's cartoony baby pig, but I shown
baby face on a pig, and it says that the
tonic quote makes children an adults as fattest pigs. So,
according to this advertisement, it sold one and a half
million bottles in a year. It even claimed to out
sell Coca Cola, although we do not really have hard
sales statistics from that era to go on with that claim.
(07:39):
I love that postcard so much it's it's cooky and weird.
It's just you can't look at it without giggle. I
can't look at it without giggling. And it's like instant
mood lift. So groves Little Pharmacy was not nearly big
enough to support this rapidly climbing popularity of the chill tonic,
so he founded the Paris Medicine Company in eight seven,
(07:59):
and that come and he incorporated in eighteen eighty nine,
and eventually the increasing demand for this product drove him
to move the entire business to St. Louis in so
he would have better access to manufacturing facilities. So, thanks
to improvements in mosquito control and flood control, malaria gradually
started to wane. And this led to two things. And
(08:20):
number one, since people didn't need chill tonic the treat
or prevent malaria anymore, it sort of became marketed as
this cure all and the Paris Medicine Company started diversifying
its company's products that had already started doing this, but
it really kicked that into a higher gear to put
out more kinds of products than just ChIL tonic, some
of which were similarly medically dubious like chill tonic had
(08:46):
an actual purpose, but then it became marketed as the
sort of it will revigorize your blood or something non legitimate.
Same thing with these other products. They weren't quite up
to today's medical standards, will honest, the need for chill
Sonic dropped off. The new flagship product for the company
became Groves Laxative bromo Coinine, which was a tablet that
(09:07):
was billed as the original one day cold cure. It
contained acetanilide, which is an actual drug that the body
will convert into a seat of menafin, so it did
have pharmacologically active ingredients, although acetanilide also has dangerous side effects,
and the claim that the drug would cure colds by
quote opening the bowels and actively killing cold germs was
(09:29):
really pretty bogus. It was not founded in truth. And
you can't see these products and they're packaging and advertisements
because they are on display at the Grove Park in
even today, the part their historical display. I had kind
of forgotten that whole aspect of it until we wandered
around this corner and found the display case of like
wacky clearly not legitimate medical products. Yeah, so this pharmaceutical
(09:54):
venture is how Grove met Fred Loring Seeley, who would
later be instrumental in building the growth park in Seely
worked for pharmaceutical company Parke Davis, and that's the company
that Grove had turned to when he was trying to
perfect his cold tablets. Seely also became groves son in
law when he married Evelyn Grove, who was E. W.
Grove's daughter, and Grove's pharmaceuticals made him an extremely wealthy man,
(10:18):
but his life had its share of hardships. It was
not all easy going. His first wife died in eight four,
and three of the four children they had had together
died in infancy, and his daughter, Evelyn was the only
one that survived. He did remarry and he had two
more children, one of whom died of diphtheria when she
was very very young. He also worked really hard to
(10:39):
make this fortune. He worked himself into exhaustion and he
developed chronic ron caius and that prompted his doctor's to
tell him to spend some of each year recovering his
health in Asheville, North Carolina, and at one point they
told him that he just needed to stay in Asheville
until further notice, and so at this point Seely took
over running a lot of pharmaceutical business, and Grove while
(11:02):
he was recovering, started buying lots of property in Asheville.
As his health got better, he started developing real estate
in Asheville and in Atlanta. And so the Grove park
In is one of the many, many properties in Asheville
and Atlanta that Seely or Grove or both of them
had a hand in developing. And so that is the
malaria element of how his fortune was made. And leading
(11:25):
up to the Grove park In, we are now moving
into the tuberculosis portion podcast. We talked about tuberculosis a
lot on this podcast lately. It really has come up
over and over, even when we select topics that we
think are in no way related to tuberculosis. It was
just pop up in the research somewhere. Um, but this
one is really there's a lot of tuberculosis elements to
talk about. Uh So, during this era, Ashville was struggling
(11:49):
with whether it should be a tourist destination or more
of a health destination for people recovering from illnesses, and
either could have been lucrative for the city. And it
was really easily suited to cover both of those bases.
It's in a beautiful part of the Blue Ridge Mountains,
and it has relatively mild winters thanks to being surrounded
by all those mountains. It's kind of kind of bowl. Yeah,
(12:11):
it kind of closes it off from some of the
harsher weather that could move in a lot of snow
and stuff kind of goes around instead of hitting Ashville directly.
So in particular, areas like Asheville were increasingly home to
tuberculosis sanatoriums. So in those years before the discovery of streptomycin,
the treatment for tuberculosis was really centered on rest and
(12:32):
nutritious food and breathing some kind of air that people
thought was wholesome in some way. And Mountain Air was
on like the Good Air List of the good types
of air that maybe would help you fight off tuberculosis.
And so this part of North Carolina had already become
home to tuberculosis sanatoriums, and recovery in one of these
(12:52):
sanatoriums took a really long time. Sometimes people would stay
there for months and months. My grandmother actually stayed at
one in Black Mountain, North Carolina, which is a little
bit east of Asheville when she was a child. But
bringing in sanatoriums had the potential to also drive away
residents who were fearful for their own health. Having a
bunch of people with tuberculosis move in could be a
(13:14):
little unsettling. Somebody that was hale and hardy did not
really want to risk exposure, especially since the only treatment,
which was like a lot of people died of tuberculosis,
and the only treatment was like this month's long stay
being you know, cared for and resting and eating wholesome food,
like it could really take months and months up to
(13:35):
a year sometimes. Yeah, And so this fear of the
residents was part of why Grove bought four eight acres
of land, including part of the western slope of Sunset Mountain,
in nine and it was both an investment in land
and a protection of the value of the other property
that he already owned. He bought it in part so
(13:55):
that no one would buy it and build a sanitorium there.
He said so in a letter to Ceiley about two
months after the sale was completed. No, we're not speculating
on that motive. You straight up said, I don't want
I don't want anybody to build a sanatorium here. Later on,
he also had the habit of buying tuberculosis sanatoriums when
they went up for sale and tearing them down, or
(14:17):
when he had property of his own to sell, he
would put this no sanatoriums clause in the sales documentation.
He was really not in favor. Yeah, he was systematically
trying to rid Asheville of the tuberculosis sanatoriums. Yeah, by
using his his well out as a real estate purchaser
(14:40):
and holder. So now let's get back to when E. W.
Grove finally decided to put a hotel on this giant
tract of land he had bought. Yeah, he wasn't uh
really on top of that idea that he didn't jump
on the thought of building an inn there right away,
And in fact, the first time an investor came to
him with that idea, he turned them down. But by
(15:01):
nineteen eleven he had started to envision this beautiful hotel
on the slope of the mountain that he had bought.
And he and Seely had gone their separate ways for
a little while after an apparent disagreement over how to
run Paris Pharmaceuticals. This is a recurring theme in their
relationship they had lots of disagreements on how to run things.
In the meantime, Seely had gone to Atlanta to start
(15:22):
a newspaper that was called The Atlanta Georgian. But by
nineteen eleven Seeli Seely was back in Asheville, shopping around
for an architect for the inn and working from photos
of the similarly rustic Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone as
an inspiration. A number of architects and designers submitted proposals
for the hotel, but Grove was not really happy with
(15:44):
any of them. Henry Ives Cob of New York did
submit a plan that looked somewhat like what the Grove
park in ultimately ended up looking like, uh, using rough
gray boulders and a red roof, And in the end
it was Seely himself and not an architect, Hughes mine
what the hotel would look like. He came up with
a sketch that Grove liked, and in turn Grove put
(16:05):
him in charge of the project, working with Cobb, and
gave him a salary and thirteen acres of land to
build a home on, and they selected a site on
the slope of the mountain, and it was one that
had a great view, but it was off the ridge
so it would be less affected by snow than other positions.
And it was also near the actual country club, which
already had its own golf course, so they were hoping
(16:27):
the guests would be able to use that as well.
Like that they could work on a partnership deal. So
we already mentioned that Feely and Grove often did not
work well together. Seely and Cobb did not work well
together either, and ultimately Cobb was dismissed from the project,
and this left Seely free to work directly with JW. Mckibbon,
who was an architectural engineer and construction supervisor John Oscar Mills,
(16:50):
who Grove had worked with previously on some developments in Atlanta,
and they wrote ground on July nine, with the plan
of opening the following July first, which almost happened. That's
a tight build schedule. It's an extremely especially considering the
scope of what they were doing and the technology available
at the time, and building on the slope of a mountain,
Building on the slope of a mountain where weather happens,
(17:13):
even though it is relatively mild. Yeah, it's not a
lot of time to try to build a whole hotel. Yeah,
considering when it was built. Uh, that hotel and its
construction was really an engineering feat. The only typical thing
about it was the excavation. Uh. They used a steam shovel,
although they were only able to use one. One steam
shovel did the whole. The exterior was built with local
(17:36):
granite stones from surrounding mountains and some of them weighed
many many tons individually and these were hauled to the
site primarily using mules and wagons. A lot of these
wagons actually came from Asheville's T. S. Morrison and Company,
which ran from to two thousand and six. It was
very sad when it closed down very recent It had
(17:57):
gone from being the kind of place where you know,
the local farmers and and people would buy all their
general supplies to the sort of touristy kind of place
that uh cells nostalgia the form of like wind up
ten toys and stuff. And then it just wasn't sustaining.
I guess. Yeah, there were changes to downtown. It didn't
it didn't survive anymore, and they I think the owners
were ready to retire, but back to this construction project,
(18:20):
so they had to get these rocks up to the site,
and to do it, about fourteen wagons would be connected
together to form a train, and a packard truck then
towed them up the mountain. And this sounds really primitive,
but it was actually pretty effective. It could move forty
tons of rock with each load, and it was an
impressive enough engineering feat that it was actually featured in
(18:41):
national publications at the time. So they were able to
leverage power, the power of the truck and use the
load bearing of the wagons in a way that made
doable unique and really uh in the end enabled the
construction of the facility. Yeah, Italian stonemason's cut and shaped
the st owns to fit together, but they left they
(19:01):
left all of the visible faces of the stones natural.
So when you look at the h the walls that
are made of these stones, they have a very rough
hewn look. They look like boulders just stacked up together
to make a hotel. But in fact, on the backside
their cut to fit. Yeah, that's cool. On the inside,
they fit together. The hair doesn't come in. About four
dred men did the work of fitting those stones together
(19:23):
and doing all the interior work. Some of the workers
were local, but Mills also brought some of them with
him from Atlanta, and those sort of displaced workers that
were there from Atlanta were housed in a circus tent.
Just kind of another weird and wonderful factoid about GPS
the roofs. There were five different roofs that it took
to cover the whole in and they were made to
(19:46):
be fireproof. At this point in history, hotel fires were
a huge problem in terms of both monetary cost and
the cost of human life. Uh often fires and hotels
were huge and had a lot of fatalities. Plus, thanks
to its location up on the side of this mountain,
in the lack of today's firefighting equipment, if the Grove
(20:06):
park In had caught fire early in its history, it
probably would have been a total loss. There wouldn't have
been much they could do about it. So their whole
goal was to make it so that it would be
as fire resistant as possible. So they made these five
roofs to cover all the parts of the hotel with
a solid layer of concrete that was poured over forms
and supports, and the poor went on continually twenty four
(20:28):
hours a day until they were done, so there wouldn't
be any steams for water to leak through. It's kind
of ingenious, but also seems like the hard way, Like
there's part of it and I know you know only
nominal amounts about construction, but there's part of me it's like,
couldn't they have figured out an easier way? But I
don't know. Once all that concrete cured, though, the whole
(20:51):
thing was sealed, and then they put a layer of
timbers and roofing felt uh, and then the distinctive red
tile roof topped it all off, and that meant there
was there while this was this layer of wood. It
was like green timbers that wouldn't burn as well, and
there was this huge layer of concrete between them and
other would like a firewall. So another unique bit of
(21:15):
the way the hotel was constructed is that the elevators
and the historic part of the end are built inside
the fireplaces. Purportedly, this was to shield guests from the noise.
So if they're not in the fire part of the fireplaces,
they're kind of behind that part in the huge stone
walls of the fireplaces. So when you want to take
(21:36):
the elevator, you go and stand in this little alcove
that is adjacent to the fireplace. The strange historic elevator
comes and takes you up to your room. That's very fascinating.
I haven't been, so I'm trying to picture it. It's
hard to picture, and it's hard enough to picture even
if you were staying there, Like do I walk through
(21:56):
the fire Yeah, we would be waiting for the elevator
and people would come and be like for the fire
elevator that is inside the fireplace. The fireplaces are enormous
and beautiful. You could walk right in, you could, yeah. Uh.
Much of the furnishings and the fixtures there came from
(22:16):
Roycroft Community, which is an arts and crafts community in
New York. And the arts and crafts movement started in
England and the Victorian era in part as a response
to the Industrial Revolution. Uh. And it drew heavily from
the writings of John Ruskin and William Morris, and it
combined workmanship and handcrafting with this thread of anti industrial sentiment.
There wasn't one set type of design to it, but
(22:38):
there was a lot of emphasis on simplicity, on skill,
and on quality. Uh. And as a testament to how
those ideals have held up, there are many of the
original Roycroft pieces and other arts and Craft's antiques still
in use at the Grove Park in so they have
lasted more than a hundred years. UH. And in the
US UH, the arts and crafts movement is also called
(22:59):
them mission style, So if you hear someone referred to
mission style stuff. Second, as a side note to our
podcast archives, the Chicago Arts and Craft Society started at
Hull House, so if you listen to Jane Adams episode,
it's all tied together. So the Great Hall, which is
basically the lobby of the hotel, had a rough hewn
(23:21):
local granite interior that matched the exterior of the building,
with huge support pillars in the center and then immense
fireplaces on either end. And there are quotes from famous
authors and philosophers inscribed in various stones around the hall.
And as Tracy hinted at earlier, they did not quite
make their July first deadline for opening. The opening banquet
(23:44):
was actually held on July twelfth, nine with about four
hundred guests, including then Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan,
who included in his address the quote, today we stand
in this wonderful hotel not built for a few but
for the multitudes that will come and go. I congratulate
these men they have built for the ages. I think
it's a lovely sentiment. And on that note, how about
(24:07):
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And now we will get back to what happened at
the end once it opened. So things went pretty well
for the Growth park Ends first year. It looked like
(26:42):
the hotel was going to be a huge success, but
then reality intervened and on Joe Archduke Ferninand of Austria
was assassinated and World War One soon followed. In the end,
the war years were really financially precarious for the Grove
park In. That is not surprising in any way. It
(27:03):
did manage to stay open, although it was not always
profitable during that time. But after World War One ended,
the Grove park In became a popular destination for the
well off, and many of its guests were there for
lengthy days of rejuvenation and relaxation, so that Mountain Air
was considered healthy for many reasons, not just to cure
(27:24):
a specific disease, but it was generally, you know, considered
a healthful place to spend some time. Yeah. Ashville still
has that reputation. Yeah, And after ongoing disputes with Grove Seeley,
uh leased the hotel from him and took over its
management and established it as a place where businessmen, businessmen
and perhaps their wives but preferably not their children could
(27:44):
come to rest and recuperate from the strain of their lives.
They kept it meticulously, meticulously clean. There was a lot
of effort put into keeping the place absolutely spotless, and
they also served what they considered to be wholesome food.
But it was also clearly not for sick people. There
(28:05):
was a lot of focus in those earlier years about
how this was about a place to come and you know,
refresh yourself if you've been having some chronic insomnia or
you're stressed out all the time. But it was not
intended for sick people, which they That was clearly stated
often and it did not want that association. Um At
(28:27):
the same time, though for the first few years of
its operation, people would check into their room and find
a bottle of Groves tasteless chill tonic and a shot
glass on the bedside table of each room. Um. So, well,
it was not for sick people or little people are children.
They wanted to keep it a quiet place for adults
to just relax, to relax. They were they were making
(28:50):
it a spa calling it that. Yet yeah, that one
of the people who was a visitor here. Another another
podcast connection is John Harvey Kellogg. Um, it did have
some of the same elements as the Battle Creek Uh
facility that John Harvey Kellogg was running, but with not
nearly as heavy an emphasis on all of the various
(29:12):
pseudo medical treatments that John Harvey Kellogg had going on there.
So the relationship between Celely and Grove we have mentioned
was always um a little adversarial and head buddy. But
it fell apart completely after more than twenty years when
Grove basically wrote Seeley out of his will and he
even tied up Evelyn's own inheritance that was his daughter
who was married to Seeley, so that she couldn't leave
(29:34):
any of her inheritance from Grove to Seeley if she
died before her husband did. Groves Will also made it
very clear that he wanted Seeley out of Grove Park.
So after Seeley's lease on the hotel was up, he
was just going to have to go. There would be
no renewal. Yeah, As for what caused this rift, I
don't think there was any one thing. They were both
extremely particular and extremely exact and very determined. So if
(29:58):
each of them set their mom mind to something different,
they didn't agree on what they had, you know, set
their minds on, they would really quickly start to just
go head to head over it. Plus, each of them
seemed to be kind of jealous of the other's relationship
with Evelyn. It's such sad uh in n Seely's least ended.
(30:19):
And in that same year E. W. Grove died, So
Seeli ended his work at the Grove Park on the
eve of the Great Depression, and he turned his attention
to other businesses he'd started, including woodworking and textile manufacturing,
including built more industries. So, even though groves Will had
specified very clearly that his Asheville holdings were not to
(30:41):
be sold in a whole or in part, soon after
all this happened, his son, who was E. W. Grove Jr.
And the hotels general manager, William Curran, decided eventually not
long after this happened, to sell it. They did find
a buyer, but the End fell on really hard times
almost right away and wound up to fall saying on
both of its mortgages during the Great Depression, and the
(31:03):
history of the Grove varies a lot for the next
couple of decades. For a few months during World War Two,
the End was an internment facility UH and the first
group of people interned there were diplomats from Hungary, Bulgaria
and Italy, and as these diplomats were released, they were
then replaced with German and Japanese internees. So during this
(31:23):
time the only guests of the Crow Partner were people
that were forced to be there. They were not they
were prisoners. And when it when it was more of
a diplomatic facility, the security was a lot more lax
than once it was a German and Japanese internees. Those
generally were not diplomats, they were regular people who were
being interned because of where they were from or where
(31:46):
their families were from. So then beginning in October of
nineteen forty two, the growth Park started to house injured
seamen from the U. S. Navy. This went on until
the spring of nine, and then in nineteen forty four
it became one of distribution centers for United States soldiers
returning from combat during World War Two. So returning soldiers
would get a furlough to go visit their homes and families,
(32:08):
and then they'd spend up to fourteen days and the
distribution centers getting physical exams, filling out paperwork, that kind
of thing. And also in nineteen forty four, for around
a month, Philippine president in exile Manuel el Quizon also
temporarily ran the government from the Grove Park in After
World War Two, once it was functioning as an inn
(32:31):
again rather than all of these other roles it had
taken on during the war, the end really started to
show its age. It gradually fell into disrepair and it
went through a series of owners and managers until it
was bought by an entrepreneur named Charles A. Salmon's in
nineteen fifty five. Salmon's invested in renovations and modernization, and
it was a project so big that the hotel closed
(32:53):
for the winter to get it all done. The goal
of this was to end quote modernize, so many of
the original furnishings and fixtures were altered or replaced since
at this point Arts and Crafts, dick Core and the
whole look that it had been put in was really
out of favor. So when the growth Park reopened, it
(33:13):
was as a seasonal resort that had a very fifties
look and feel, and there was even a newly built
motor lodge on the property, and Salmon's continued to add
on to the facility and remodel it over the years.
He bought the golf course from the Country Club of
Asheville that they had specifically placed it in close proximity
to back when they chose the lot, so then uh
(33:36):
without a golf course. The Country Club of Ashville then
bought another golf course that had recently been put up
for sale and that all went down in After the
death of his first wife, Charles Salmon's later married a
woman named Elaine who had a lot of experience in
hotel management. She had some ideas about what to do
with the Grove Park in and it was she who
(33:56):
convinced her husband to really restore the hotel to its
historic splendor and get rid of all the fifties era
motor lodge trappings that had been modernized into it. She
also thought the hotel was going to need space for
meetings and conferences to be able to stay competitive, but
they would really have to put all of those elements
in in a way that matched the rest of the
(34:17):
historic hotel. And this massive multimillion dollar effort all started
in ninety eight and it essentially was ongoing throughout the
nineteen eighties. It involved demolition of previous editions that had
grown dated, a total renovation of the whole property, and
construction of two new wings, the Salmons and the Vanderbilt Wings.
Great pains were taken to modernize while still keeping the
(34:41):
historic feel. So while the facilities were modern, the look
of it was historic. Uh. And they even went right
down to using period appropriate color palettes in the historic rooms.
So for the decor, Elaine Salmon's bought an extensive collection
of arts and crafts antiques. Yeah, some of the stuff
that they still had and had in storage brought out.
Then she also bought new stuff that was really old stuff.
(35:04):
When Charles Sammons died in his financial advisers really tried
to convince his wife to sell the hotel. They had
bought several hotels over the years, and they had gotten
you know buyers for most of them, but they had
held onto the growth park in She refused, and what
she wanted to do was to make it a world
class resort and spa, so she kept pouring more money
(35:25):
into restoring and refurbishing the historic main inn in n
the palm courts and the historic main inn was restored
to how it had looked in thirteen and this even
included meticulously removing layers and layers of old paint and
then using photographs of the original area and comparing it
to what they had on earth so that they could
replicate the centil work that had been done in the
(35:48):
original decor uh. The entire roof, including the concrete layer,
was replaced in nine after leaking became a problem, and
it was replaced with clay tile to look exactly like
the original. Construction of a spa started in and it
was built almost entirely underground so it wouldn't block the
view from the hotel. The spot opened in two thousand
(36:11):
one and in two thousand two, the golf course was
restored to its original design, which had been done by
golf course designer Donald Ross. Elaine Salmons died in two
thousand nine, and there wasn't really anyone in the Salmon's
family who wanted to take up the hotel and its operations.
She had clearly been very devoted to She was extremely
to be hard to find anybody to fill her when
(36:33):
I was working there. She was still living when I
was working there, and when she would visit the hotel,
we all had to be extra extra. We had to
be on the ball all the time. We had to
be exceptionally on the ball. MS Salmon's was on the property,
of course. Uh So the property was purchased by KSL
Resorts in and it is now the Omnigrove Park. Yeah,
(36:57):
that is very recent. So because this hotel has been
around so long and has had just so much of
a great history, there are many many prominent guests who
have visited there at some point in another. There are
so many presidents and diplomats, famous entertainers like Harry Houdini
also the subject of a prior podcast, and many prominent
(37:19):
industrialists from earlier eras of American history. William Howard Taft
stayed for a time before his death in nineteen thirties
he tried to recover from heart disease. Both Franklin d
and Eleanor Roosevelt visited separately, and as part of a
side note, Ceely and his wife Evelyn, who as we
said was groves daughter, met Herbert Hoover and his wife
(37:40):
lou in China, and all four of them narrowly escaped
the Boxer rebellion adventures with Grove and Seely. Henry Ford,
Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone were all fond of the
inn and they would actually hang out there together. They're
even pictures on display of the three of them outside
the inn after a camping trip that are still displayed
(38:02):
in the hotel. And many of these, uh you know,
sort of notable characters were people that Seeley had met
during his newspaper days. And one of the most well
known long term guests and also the topic of a
past history podcast was f Scott Fitzgerald, and he stayed
for months at a time in the mid thirties. At
(38:23):
first this was for the sake of his own health,
and then later it was to be near Zelda, who
was hospitalized for mental illness at Highland Hospital in Nashville,
and that's where she later tragically died in a fire.
Uh More recently, President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama
have visited, and the golf clubs and basketball that he
played with while he was there are on display. We
(38:43):
were just kind of funny. Yeah, we we were giggling
over that because we kept finding the displays that were
like and then when pere's the President Barack Obama was here,
here are the golf clubs that he played with. Here's
the basketball that he played with. There are many things
that many famous people had at them or where there
aren't around the hoell um so recent I think that's
(39:04):
probably why it's funny. It was very funny to me.
Um there there are walls of pictures of all kinds
of notable figures, including many past presidents of many political affiliations.
So it is not just that makes it funny, so
funny too. It would be like if you left the
studio and I took a piece of paper you had
written a note on, and I was like, here, Tracy
(39:26):
Wilson wrote a note, except I'm not president uh, and
then uh to wrap up tell us the ghosts ghost story. So, yes,
all good old inns have a ghost story, and the
one at the Grove Park is the Pink Lady. The
story goes that the Pink Lee is a woman who
fell to her death from one of the upper floors
(39:48):
of the Palm Court. So the Palm Court is sort
of the central room area of the historic and it's
built like an atrium, and so the rooms are around
the side and there's a long drop down into the
bottom if you're on one of the upper floors. So allegedly,
sometime during the nineteen twenties, a woman fell from one
of these upper floors and died, although we're not really
(40:09):
sure who this might have been. Um Now she is
said to haunt room five forty five, although in a
very friendly way. Everyone describes her as a you know,
a benevolent ghost who is playful and likes children, not
a nice creepy way like the previous errors of the
inn where they ask guests to not bring your children
(40:29):
and bring your kids. He's okay with it now. It
is fine to bring children to the Grove Park. There
are no signs everywhere about how you had better not
be a sick person if you were coming to stay there.
Um that the whole Now, it's definitely you know, a
nice place for people and families to come and take
a visit, uh with lots of gracious people. I'm not
trying to sound like an ad for them, but I
(40:51):
felt that to be true while I worked there, and
I felt that to be true recently when I got
to stay there. I wonder if many many people request five, Well,
they don't really announce this is the haunted room. You
can find that on the internet though that a lot
of the rooms in the historic main Inn have little
(41:12):
labels on them of like the famous historical person that
stayed in that room, especially if the person stayed there
for a really long time. Uh So, the room that
we got to stay in was just down the hall
from the suite of the suite of rooms that f
Scott Fitzgerald stayed in, which was kind of I found
that to be kind of cool. We pretty much the
whole time we were there, when we were not eating food,
(41:34):
we were wandering around the hotel looking at all of
these historical things. Because even though I worked there for
two years, I didn't get to you know, walk around
and look at historical from the case of the employees,
are really cool places. Never get to appreciate those places.
I was underground. So um, if you were interested in
all of this, uh, there is a book by Bruce
Johnson called Built for the Ages, A History of the
(41:55):
Grove Park in that includes just pages and pages of
historical photograph the whole thing being built. Um, all kinds
of interesting facts about the history of the hotel that
we did not go into here. It's it's basically from
start to finish, the whole thing lovely, lovely black and
white pictures of people in there, you know, twenties attire,
(42:15):
hanging out with the Grove Park. So, yes, that is
the Grove Park. If I were an extremely rich person,
you would go there frequently. I would, But I am not,
and so go there. I go there on the generosity
of other people. I did get to stay there when
I was working there one time because I I won
(42:35):
a stay at the holiday party. That's a big deal. Okay,
So I have some listener mail. Correctly you share it,
I will. This is from Gregory. Gregory says Holly and Tracy. Hi,
I'm a big fan of your podcast. You both make
my commute to and from work much more bearable. Thank you, Greg,
actually says Greg at the bottom, so I actually call
(42:57):
him Greg. I also listened to your show all Right
Around with my four year old son Thor. We were
recently listening to your episode about the Flannon Aisle lighthouse disappearance,
and he has been talking about it ever since. We
talked about it all of the time, and he keeps
coming up with his own theories about what happened to
the three workers. Here are a few that he asked
(43:17):
me to submit for your consideration. The workers met some
mermaids and went to live with them. I think that
sounds fun a und of that breathing problem. It sounds
like a great way to go. We'll just get the
sea witch to take care of that for us, an
exchange for something that makes us crucially individual with I
was singing in the Futurama solution which is non delightful.
That seemed to work. O we could we could have
(43:38):
gilly weed from Herry Potter. Yeah, there are options, so
back it's growing sla. The next choice was less delightful.
A sea monster at them. Well yeah, and then the
next one is a mummy took them. Huh. Seafery mummies
not so well known, but I'm not willing to rule
it out. Well, if if they had proper, you know,
(44:00):
desiccant on board, they could probably deal with that. And
then my personal favorite, someone dressed up as a mummy
or a werewolf or a sea monster and kidnapped them
and then he hasn't got the seas. Thor is also
a fan of Scooby Doo. Thanks for making a great
show and for giving my son and I have something
to talk about. Greg. This is seriously one of the
most delightful. Thank you Thor for having these wonderful ideas
(44:26):
about the plan and I'll lighthouse and thank you Greg
for sharing them with us. That's how history semesteries are solved,
first brain storming possibilities and then seeing how they could
have played out well. And I love the idea of
of of parents and kids talking about whatever they've been
listening to her watching. I remember when I was a kid,
my mom and I would go to the movies. One
(44:47):
of my favorite things was apt in the movie talking
to my mom about a movie. M Yeah, we would
do that on the way home. It was just me
and my mom. For some reason, my brother I guess
would be camping with my dad or something. I don't know.
I don't remember my brother being president during this talk, right,
did have one? I do have one? My brother is
(45:07):
in the present tense. I should thank him again for
contributing to your stay and helping make it a feasible
for us to spend a night there. So, okay, if
you would like to write to us, there are so
many ways you can do so. We are at History
Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook at
facebook dot com slash history class stuff, and on Twitter
(45:29):
at missed in History. Our tumbler is at missed in
History dot tumbler dot com. And after we're done here,
I'm gonna go pen a bunch of group park and
stuff on pinteres. If you would like to learn a
little more of the kookier side of what we talked
about today, go to our website and put the word
Ashville in the search bar. You will find an article
(45:50):
called how the five day weekend works, which, if you
know anything about Asheville, it is not surprising at all
that that idea originated. There. You can learn a whole
lot more about that and many many other subjects at
our website, which is how stuff works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it
(46:12):
has stuff works dot com. Audible dot com is the
leading provider of downloadable digital audio books and spoken word entertainment.
Audible has more than one thousand titles to choose from
(46:32):
to be downloaded to your iPod or MP three player.
Go to audible podcast dot com slash history to get
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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