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The Greenbrier: Recreation in History
| Article
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19912 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1992 |
4,237 Words |
| Author
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Liz Trotta
Liz Trotta is the author of Fighting for Air; In the Trenches
with Network Television |
In 1935, Rex Stout, a mystery writer from Indiana, brought his detective, Nero Wolfe, to a great American resort in West Viriginia. Wolfe is called up on to solve a murder at the Kanawha Spa, a thinly disguised alias for what is still--fifty-seven years later-the Greenbrier of White Sulfur Springs. In Stout's book, Too Many Cooks, detective Wolfe is on the prowl with Archie, his wisecracking sidekick. Archie, a New Yorker, is wary;
I strolled along carefree. There was lots of junk to look at if you happened to be interested in it--big clusters of pink flowers everywhere on bushes…mountain laurel, and a brook zipping along with little bridges across it here and there, and some kind of wild trees in bloom, and birds and evergreens and so on. That sort of stuff is all right, I've got nothing against it, and of course out in the country like that something might as well be growing or what would you do with all the space, but I must admit it's a poor place to look for excitement.
Excitement, indeed. After all, it all started when one day a lady came here for a bath, as Robert Conte explains it. He readjusts his eyeglasses, smiles indulgently, and motions his charges forward. America's only known in-house resort historian is on the move, enlivening his well-practiced account of how a frontier halfway house became an American institution.
Amanda's Bath
Splendid in a baby-blue ultrasuede jacket, Conte seems anything but the dusty hobo-patched archivist. A transplanted Californian, he has adapted effortlessly to the affable pattern of what used to be called "agreeable society" at the Greenbrier. Passing under the white oaks that frame the sloping lawn, he halts at the green-domed Springhouse--"a symbolic alter of health." It was here that Amanda Anderson took her bath in 1778, according to Greenbrier lore. An early settler suffering from rheumatism, she heard, possibly from Indians, about the curative powers of a mineral water spring bubbling in the valley. She bathed in a hollowed-out log, the legend continues, drank the water, returned home, and a few weeks later Anderson could have sailed the surrounding Alleghenies like Shawnee brave. Word of this frontier Lourdes spread far and wide. And that, they say, is how "taking the cure" at the Greenbrier began.
Conte is conducting a tour of the grounds. His wife, Betsy an image management consultant who is director so social activities, leads the interior tour. Like so many couples
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