Ladies and Gentlemen on Display: Planter Society at the Virginia Springs, 1790–1860

Part 1 The Scene

pa rt 1 The Scene IN THE LATE 1700S CAPT. HANCOCK LEE, WHO SUFFERED from chronic gout, recognized the value—both medicinal and monetary —of a mineral spring that he found in Fauquier County, Virginia. Lee purchased the property and built a wooden lodge for himself and the few invalids already visiting the healing waters. He later sold the property to his son, Hancock Lee Jr., and his son’s partner, Thomas Green. Envisioning a full-scale pleasure resort along both banks of the Rappahannock River similar to the ones flourishing in Europe and developing west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the new owners purchased three thousand more of the surrounding acres. By 1834 a four-story Greek Revival hotel, ‘‘The Pavilion,’’ stood upon a rise as the centerpiece of the resort (see fig. 1). Twelve huge Doric columns supported a wide portico that stretched the nearly two-hundred-footlength of the building, offering strollers ‘‘a delightful promenade.’’ Six pairs of small brick cottages formed a crescent on each side of the hotel. Threestory wooden buildings with long porticos on each floor, named ‘‘Norfolk Place’’ and ‘‘Williamsburg House,’’ marked the two ends of the cottage crescent. Lee proclaimed that these accommodations were ‘‘probably unsurpassed .’’ The springhouse resembled a Greek temple with Doric columns , a domed roof nearly forty feet in diameter, and a statue of the goddess of Health. It stood at the foot of the hill, opposite the hotel, connected to the cottages by serpentine paths. Knowing their importance to his guests, 13 Lee boasted that ‘‘great attention’’ had been paid ‘‘to the proposed amusements of the guests’’ and that he had procured ‘‘the best Wines and Spirits’’ and ‘‘the services of some of the best cooks in the State.’’1 After incorporating in 1837 and accumulating more capital, Lee and Green added buildings , creating an elegant resort that catered to their elite visitors’ ideas of fashion. ‘‘New magnificent chandeliers’’ adorned the ‘‘elegant ballroom.’’ Additional lodging houses, stables, and cottages lined the lawn and nestled in the hills surrounding the hotel. Near the springhouse, a new bathhouse enclosed hot and cold baths and fourteen private bathing rooms. The building had an ‘‘Octagon Gothic exterior, whose minerets and spires indicate the determination of the company to please the fancy and gratify the taste’’ of fashionable visitors.2 A bowling alley bordered the lawn. To satisfy one of the first loves of Virginians and other southerners, the proprietors put in a one-mile race track across the Rappahannock, the ‘‘Victoria Course,’’ with spectators’ and judges’ stands. By 1850 Fauquier White Sulphur Springs could accommodate eight hundred people; visitors continually filled the rooms during the summer season.3 ThroughouttheSouth, in the nation’s capital about fifty miles away, and even in many northern 14 Ladies and Gentlemen o n d i s p l ay Figure 1. Fauquier White Sulphur Springs, in Moorman, Virginia Springs, 1857. (Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville) The image placed here in the print version has been intentionally omitted guidebooks, elite men and women touted Fauquier White Sulphur Springs as one of the most fashionable places to spend a summer. For the South’s plantation gentry, the Virginia Springs resorts made up an important part of what historian Richard Bushman has called the ‘‘geography of refinement.’’ The springs resorts provide some of the best examples of ‘‘places marked by beauty and frequented by mannerly people in proper dress, [who] engaged in elevated activities.’’4 For southern planters, a map of such refined places extended from their large, wealthy plantations to elegant town houses and terminated at the Virginia Springs, the spot that epitomized refinement and grace for most of its visitors. The refined areas that marked this map distinguished the men and women who frequented or lived in them from the other, ‘‘lesser’’ members of their society. In the service of refinement, the architecture and landscape of the Virginia Springs became something like backdrops or stage sets for the genteel visitors who were simultaneously actors and audience, observing, judging , and performing for each other as they moved from resort to resort. The usually graceful and attractive buildings and grounds set the scene for the drama of class-formation and the rituals of planter class power at the springs. In the resorts’ hotels, cabins, ballrooms, lawns, gardens, and surrounding countryside, refined visitors played with as well as competed against each other, relaxed as well...