[For this year’s installment of my annual Charlottesville series—following the boys and my annual trip to my childhood home, natch—I’ll focus on a handful of representative places around town. Leading up to a tribute to the public schools that nurtured this AmericanStudier!]
On four
exemplary stages of one of Charlottesville’s most enduring sites.
Fry’s Spring
earned its name through one of the area’s early 19th century
blue-bloods. James Francis Fry, grandson of Joshua
Fry (one of the two men who patented Albemarle County in the mid-18th
century), received 300 acres of land in the area from his father-in-law, the
equally prominent local Nelson
Barksdale, in 1839. Fry built the estate Azalea Hall on the site but also
discovered a nearby spring, which he christened Fry’s Spring and which by
mid-century had become well-known throughout the region. This was the era in
which President Buchanan maintained a “Summer White House”
at Pennsylvania’s Bedford Springs, and Fry’s Spring offered those further
south their own such escape.
By the end of
the century, the spring had changed hands and become part of a far more
elaborate resort community, one connected to the nearby Jefferson Park Hotel. This
was the height of the Gilded Age, an era defined both by conspicuous
consumption and by the rise of marketing and advertising to appeal to those
wealthiest Americans, and the Hotel offered it all: access to waters advertised as “the third most
powerful of their kind in the world”; an on-site menagerie known as
Wonderland; and two different train lines (a small “dummy-line” and a larger
steam locomotive) to bring visitors to the site. Resorts and spas were no
longer simply for first families and presidents—they were part of a network of
sites linked to the upper stratum of Gilded Age America, such as Newport’s
mansions, Lenox’s Ventfort
Hall, and many others.
The Hotel burned
down in 1910 (with salvaged wood being used to construct nearby homes,
including one in which a certain AmericanStudier grew up!), and the land was
sold to a trolley company that focused on adding to the Wonderland amusements. Among
other ways in which Wonderland was developed in this era, the company added the
city’s first moving picture shows. This was the period in which this new form
of entertainment was sweeping the nation, but to my mind the movies signaled
more than just a new technology—they represented, along with the
rise of professional sports and the popularity of places like Coney
Island, Revere
Beach, and other so-called “trolley
parks,” a democratization of leisure, a broadening of sites like Fry’s
Spring to include more than Virginia blue bloods or the nation’s upper classes.
The next stage
of that democratization of leisure and of Fry’s Spring began soon thereafter,
and has continued into this AmericanStudier’s life and the 21st
century. Local businessman
J. Russell Dettor bought the site in 1920 and built a swimming pool, which
he opened in 1921 as Fry’s
Spring Beach Club. The century since has seen plenty more history and
evolution, including those related to segregation that I detailed in this essay
for the Activist History Review, but
they’ve all been connected to the Beach Club. The Beach Club where I kept the
beach ball up and swam laps and played tennis throughout my youth, and where I
just took my boys for the next stage of their own Charlottesville histories and
stories. Their lips got a lot bluer than their blood, and the only water they
tried was heavily chlorinated, but the story of Fry’s Spring continues into the
21st century nonetheless.
Next
Cville place tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Defining places—from your hometowns or anywhere else—you’d highlight?
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