Ladies and Gentlemen on Display

‘‘Solidity, Strength, and Grandeur’’

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pp. 16-31

The southern elite’s search for pleasure, health, and a cooler climate reflected a general trend among the nation’s elite. Beginning around 1800, wealthy men and women throughout the United States increasingly traveled for pleasure as well as health. A nascent tourist industry quickly arose to meet the demand. Travel guidebooks began touting scenic sites. Enterprising...

‘‘A Country More Wildly Picturesque’’

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pp. 31-36

The settings of the Virginia Springs juxtaposed controlled landscapes with uncontrolled nature.Wild disorder surrounded tamed order. Rows of rugged mountains, multitudes of cascading streams, and expanses of deep forests formed the resorts’ perimeters and contrasted sharply with the refined and well-tended grounds and buildings within their confines. The few valley...

‘‘At Great Trouble and Expense’’

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pp. 36-49

The Virginia Springs proprietors who envisioned, constructed, and operated the resorts led difficult lives. Their backgrounds, property holdings, and occupation gave them an ambiguous place in southern society. Yet these men and their establishments played an important role not only for planter society, but also in their Shenandoah Valley neighborhoods. Resort...

‘‘Bribe High and You Live High’’

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pp. 49-56

‘‘King Cure All’’

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pp. 59-68

As some of the first chroniclers of life at the Virginia Springs noted, most people who traveled to the springs resorts were not invalids. From the late eighteenth century through 1860, visitors came not so much to search for a cure, but—in addition to seeking pleasure—to continue the relatively good health that they already enjoyed. In 1829 George Harrison and his wife Isabella...

‘‘They All Drink the Waters without the Advice of Any Medical Man’’

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pp. 68-78

Examining the attitudes about health and treatment held by visitors to the Virginia Springs and their correspondents provides an intriguing glimpse at popular medical beliefs and practices. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most people held ideas about health and appropriate...

‘‘Every Day Var[ies] a Little’’

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pp. 78-85

Whether or not they were ill, all of the springs visitors bathed in or drank the waters. While mid-nineteenth-century orthodox medicine regarded and treated the sexes differently, men and women at the Virginia Springs shared the same routine, drinking the waters at the same times and often in the same quantities.1 Doctors prescribed, and experienced visitors...

‘‘The Most Delicious Sensations’’

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pp. 85-98

The new sensations of and constant attention paid to the body constituted a major component of the Virginia Springs experience for every visitor— whether in search of health or pleasure. All of the visitors, male and female, closely monitored the function and appearance of their own bodies and often of others’ bodies as well. They focused primarily on what went into...

‘‘A Never Ceasing Scene of Stir, Animation, Display, & Enjoyment’’

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pp. 104-119

The Virginia Springs environment highlighted and intensified the characteristics prized by the southern gentry. The exclusivity of the resorts and the orderliness of life there strongly appealed to the visitors. Guests relished the amusement and leisure that pervaded the spot. The exclusivity and dedication to order, refinement, and gentility also created an easy and...

‘‘Forming Violent Friendships in Three Days Time’’

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pp. 119-127

Most studies of plantation life suggest that, outside of their immediate families and households, elite southerners possessed few opportunities and little desire to interact with the opposite sex, much less to form close friendships. These historians conclude that a vast emotional gulf between men and women and a sharp segregation of daily lives prohibited mutual...

‘‘You Might Have Supposed Them All Quite Intimate’’

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pp. 127-142

Even though men and women who visited the Virginia Springs shared a remarkable mutuality, their experiences differed in some ways; women enjoyed more leisure than men and experienced a sharper contrast with their lives at home. At the springs, planter women enjoyed a release from...

‘‘You Are Now Just Entering upon That School of Life’’

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pp. 142-151

The atmosphere at the springs provided the perfect place where young men and women could, perhaps for the first time, socialize with a large group of their peers from across the South. These ‘‘beaux’’ and ‘‘belles’’ became the pulse of the resorts, the driving force behind most of the social life and competition. A season at the springs served for many planter children as a...

‘‘A Great Deal Is Affected, but Nothing on the Heart in It’’

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pp. 152-175

Most wealthy visitors regarded the Virginia Springs as a place of pleasure and leisure, yet their very presence made the resorts places of intense ritual and competition. While visitors eased some rules of gender relations, they did not relax their general expectations for proper southern ladies and gentlemen. If anything, the demands of such roles became clearer. At the...

‘‘Love-Making May Fairly Be Set Down as One of the Amusements of the Virginia Springs’’

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pp. 175-186

As the springs environment intensified the good and the bad characteristics of southern gentility, it also exaggerated the gender expectations and roles of young adults in ways that could produce conflicts. Belles and beaux knew the importance of a good performance at the springs, and they played their parts of ladies and cavaliers to the fullest extent. In the romantic atmosphere...

‘‘They Seemed to Sink into the Deepest Insignificance’’

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pp. 187-200

Part of southern gentility involved constructing rigid boundaries that demarcated fashionable white society. At the resorts, the elite defined itself by whom it accepted into the inner circle and whom it shunned. Despite the feelings of community, intimacy, and harmony at the Virginia Springs, the lines that elite men and women drew between themselves and others prevented excluded groups from exercising any real social influence at the...

‘‘Honor to Those Days of Chivalry’’

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pp. 200-208

The ‘‘southernness’’ of the Virginia Springs appeared in its most explicit form in a series of special events that brought together and revolved around all of the characteristics of the southern gentry. After about 1830, elite southerners, influenced by romanticism, increasingly linked themselves...