Rockbridge Vignettes

In the summer of 1863 was born in Lexington one Ernest Lee Rhodes, and he was, according to a headline in the local newspaper when he had reached the age of 63, a “very very bad boy.” (Those being gentler days than ours, exact details were withheld.) One day our leading merchant, James McD. Adair, offered him employment as a sweeper, and the lad bragged that he would outshine his patron by becoming the leading merchant in the south. Indeed did young Rhodes soon enter the millinery business, first in Baltimore and then in Atlanta, and there he built an enormous wholesale hat business, becoming, as our newspaper put it, worth “nearly a million” and living in “a palatial home.” But the man never forgot his early sponsor, and took the then-elderly Adair and Mrs. Adair to Colorado Springs for a three-week holiday. After the last bugle, Rhodes was laid to rest in our own town cemetery.

D’you sometimes get annoyed at all those out-of-state cars taking up parking spaces on Main Street? You should send them a thank-you note instead. The Rockbridge Advocate, which remains piggy in its independence even in the height of visitor season, reports the following, taken from the latest report on area tourism:
• 16% of all our retail sales come from tourists
• 27% of restaurant spending comes from tourists, and their average restaurant check is $95
• Tourism accounts for 1,273 local jobs, which pay on average $34,800
In total, tourists pump $224 million into the local economy. For comparison, that’s the same as W&L’s entire annual budget, 77% greater than VMI’s. Hooray for tourists!

This is the Hamilton School, in lower Buffalo, dating to 1823 but here in a photo from 1909, probably the best-preserved one-room schoolhouse in Virginia. It was a typical community school building in its day. According to Oren Morton, in his 1920 history of Rockbridge County, “the minimum required” of teachers in the early days — before a formal public school system was established — was proficiency in English, good handwriting, an ability to make quill pens and enthusiasm for imposing discipline on the pupils. In addition, many teachers could give instruction in the classics. “The pedagogue of that age was nearly always a man, and as he was often of mature years he had some prestige in the community.”

Dr. Edmund Pendleton Tompkins (1868-1952), a famed Rockbridge physician and earth-moving force behind the Rockbridge Historical Society, once wrote about the home remedies he found Rockbridge people using instead of the medical treatments he prescribed:
• Hold an ax with its blade toward the ground to stop blood loss
• A raw potato cures a boil
• Nutmeg hung around your neck relieves a toothache
• To get rid of a wart, steal a dishcloth from a neighbor and bury it. As the cloth rots underground, it will take the wart with it.
• If that doesn’t work, cut an onion in quarters, bury the pieces, and wait for the next rain, which will wash away the wart.

Hickory Hill, continued. According to its National Register description, Hickory Hill’s most distinctive feature is perhaps its spiral staircase. Over all, says the Register says, it’s a remarkable property “because it exemplifies some of the best details of early 19th century Shenandoah Valley architecture … rare architectural form, quality of detail and high degree of historic integrity.” It left the Grigsby family late in 1878 but remains privately owned and well preserved.

Samuel Brown Morrison, a Brownsburg native, owned and operated the Rockbridge Baths Sanitarium after the Civil War (in which he had been a medic for the Confederacy). The resort’s waters were rich in iron and carbonic acid, and the sanitarium was popular while Dr. Morrison ran it. But when he retired because of ill health, the customer base vanished, and Virginia Military Institute eventually acquired the site, which it used as a summer school. But in 1926 (like an alarming number of other hotels in the early 20th century) the sanitarium burned to the ground, and VMI eventually sold the property.

Hickory Hill, near Glasgow, is one of the so-called Seven Hills of Rockbridge, associated with the Grigsby family that shaped early Rockbridge. To be specific, that’s Reuben Grigsby (1780-1863), who grew up at Fruit Hill, an earlier Hill/Grigsby plantation, and was a soldier, farmer and politician who represented Rockbridge in the Virginia Assembly. He built Hickory Hill in 1823-24.

In 2016, after 13 years, Natural Bridge and the county fathers didn’t want Foamhenge any longer. When the bridge became a state park, the grinches in charge said it “didn’t fit.” The good people of Centreville, Va., thought better, however. And why wouldn’t they? It’s a full-size, meticulously sculpted replica of the original, except it weighs less because it’s made of Styrofoam. Fun fact: An astronomer helped with the move from Rockbridge to Fairfax County.

A hundred years ago, in the summer of 1926, mosquitos were the Number One enemy in Rockbridge,. One anonymous writer in the County News demanded to know why we pay to promote tourism when horrified visitors will only be driven away by marauding swarms of insects. He (or more likely she) wrote that while men are good at pondering problems like this, “if enough women will nag and beset the men in authority whose duty it is to rid this town of these pests, it will be done.” The anti-mosquito crusade continued all summer (with a detour to debate, inconclusively, whether anonymous criticism was proper), centering on whether eradicating the pests was an individual or municipal responsibility.

Southern Virginia University is unofficially run now by the Latter Day Saints, unofficially called the Mormons, but it got its start as a Methodist school called Southern Seminary and Junior College. It traces its origins to an institution founded in 1867 as the Home School for Girls, in Bowling Green, Va., close to Fort A.P. Hill in Caroline County. In 1901, Dr. Edgar Rowe brought the school to Buena Vista and situated it in the 1891 hotel building on the top of what’s now Seminary Hill. The building had survived as a hotel only as long as the Buena Vista boom lasted.