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THE SPRINGS OF VIRGINIA
LIFE, LOVE, AND DEATH AT THE WATERS 1775-1900
BY
PERCEVAL RENIERS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS
REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER
DEDICATION
To Ashton
Whose Enthusiasm and Industry
Prepared the Way
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
IN COLOR
The Tavern, White Sulphur Springs
From a water color after the original by J. H. B. LATROBE
At Botetourt Springs
From, a water color after the original by J. H. B. LATROBE
The Salt Sulphur
From a drawing by J. R. BUTTS, ESQ.
Blue Sulphur Springs
Water color by J. H. B. LATROBE
The Lawn, White Sulphur
From a water color after the original by J. H. B. LATROBE
Gamblers in the Daylight
From a water color after the original by J. H. B. LATROBE
IN BLACK
White Sulphur Springs about 1835
From an old drawing
Warm Springs, 1832
From a pencil sketch by J. H. B. LATROBE
Stephen Hendersons House
From a woodcut by CHARLES SMITH
The Red Sulphur, Consumptives Hope
From BURKES Mineral Springs of Western Virginia
Bath Americanus
From MOORMAN, The Virginia Springs
The Red Sweet
From MOORMAN, The Virginia Springs
Rockbridge Alum
From MOORMAN, The Virginia Springs
Bath Alum
From MOORMAN, The Virginia Springs
The Blue Sulphur in 1854
From MOORMAN, The Virginia Springs
Warm Springs
From BEYERS Album of Virginia
Shannondale Springs
From an engraving after a drawing by C. BURTON
Hot Springs, 1857, Dr. Goodes Pride
From BEYERS Album of Virginia
Saratoga, Piazza of Congress Hall
From an engraving after a drawing by C. BURTON
White Sulphur in 1857
From BEYERS Album of Virginia
Sweet Springs, 1868
From MISS CHRISTIANA BONDS sketchbook
Springhouse Levee
From Every Saturday, Oct. 1870
The White in Hal Dulanys Time
From Harpers New Monthly Magazine, Aug. 1878
Spring-Going Types in the Seventies
From the New York Graphic, Aug. 1877
At the Zenith of Belledom
5 Southern Belles
They Called the Hotel Grand Central
From J. G. PANGBORN, The Picturesque B. and O.
Idyll on a Cottage Verandah
From Harpers Weekly, Aug. 1888
The Old White Hotel
From the painting by CAROLYN VAN BEAN
THE SPRINGS OF VIRGINIA
Watering places all over the world are much alikea general muster, under the banner of folly, to drive care and common sense out of the field.
CAPTAIN MARRYAT, Diary in America .
IMr. Featherstonhaugh Makes A Visit
WHEN George W. Featherstonhaugh, F.R.S., F.G.S., arrived at the White Sulphur Springs in August, 1834, he was possessed by an idea. The idea was, when the coach stopped, to leap out ahead of all the other passengers, and the object of that was to beat them to the man in brown. Forewarned was forearmed. Over at the Warm Springs the Kentucky lady had told him how it would be. The White Sulphur was crowded to repletion, she said, and no matter how respectable you were, if you didnt come in your own carriage you were turned away without ceremony. The only possible way to get in at all was to wring the promise of a cabin from the man in brown. He controlled everything. And, said the lady from Kentucky, if he wasnt the biggest liar that ever belonged to Virginia there was a great one to be born yet.
No matter how much of a liar he was, if he had to be tackled it would certainly be better to tackle him first than last. For over forty miles of hard jouncing, Mr. Featherstonhaugh had faced the facts with the resolution of a true Britisher. First out would be first served.
The coach topped a rise, rolled gently down past some neat white cottages, turned right through a large white gate and pulled up before a building that looked like an ark. This ark, the only structure of any size in the place, was the dining room, and underneath it in the basement story were the receiving rooms, the post office and the bar. Mr. Featherstonhaugh did not wait for the driver to open the door and he did not wait for the steps to be let down. He was indeed the first out of the coach and he landed in a dusty arena in the midst of a crowd of people.
At stagecoach time the space before the receiving rooms was always swarming: Negro baggagemen, hostlers, countrymen, clerks, children and mammies, and clean crisp ladies and gentlemen searching the coaches for their friends, the ladies in fine muslin with enormous puffed sleeves, the gentlemen in blue swallow-tails with brass buttons, fawn colored trousers, high choking stocks around their necks, all fresh as daisies. And here, dusty, bedraggled, excited, aching and bewildered the new arrivals milled about like the lost and the damned, most of them without a place to lay their heads that night.
Immediately in front of him Mr. Featherstonhaugh found a clamoring circle of humanity pressing around a short heavy-set gentleman, the man in brown himself, topped off with a tall brown greasy beaver which he wore tilted at such an angle that the wonder was it stayed on at all. The clamorers were obviously suing for the stocky ones favor. They argued and expostulated. They tried to impress him with their importance, their distress, the desperate state of their health, but the gentleman under the dirty beaver did not look impressed. He only looked as if he wished the lot of them to hell. Just now he stood with arms akimbo and his round pugnacious face was annoyed.
Still ahead of his coachmates, the Britisher elbowed his way through the levee around the man in brown and demanded where he might see Mr. Anderson. The man in brown turned a look of insolent indifference on the Fellow of the Royal Society.
I reckon I am Mr. Anderson, he said.
So it was that Mr. Featherstonhaugh made the acquaintance of Major Baylis Anderson, unquestionably in those days the most important personage in the South. The most important, that is to say, while the Springs season was on, which was during July and August and part of September. From Baltimore down to New Orleans, from St. Louis to St. Augustine there was not another man so courted and so vilified, so autocratic and insolent, so talked about and written about, so burdened and so chivvied and withal so little appreciated as Major Anderson.
