In the high-collar summers of the 1880’s, Grande dames in stiff white lace rocked decorously on the broad verandas of a thousand sprawling resort hotels. As  President
Grover Cleveland’s White House buckled in the heat, the United
States’ breezy islands and air-cooled mountains tops were scenes
of numberless July and August caravans.Green Park Inn in Blowing Rock, North Carolina was a favorite summer getaway for anyone who could afford the tab. Bustling entourages – parents, grandparents, children, maids, and valets – arrived with tons of trunks for visits of four to eight weeks. Freed from steamy stock markets, wood-stove kitchen, and prickly heat, families put aside starched shirt collars, wallowed in the water of mineral springs, and marveled at scenic wonders. Eminent guests from Herbert Hoover to Eleanor Roosevelt, from Margaret Mitchell to Calvin Coolidge, signed the register. John D. Rockefeller, true to form, tipped everyone a thin dime. Ladies and gentlemen in white linen or flannel played very genteel games of lawn tennis and croquet. The daring went on horse expeditions, canoeing – or target shooting with Annie  Oakley, the famed woman sharpshooter from the Buffalo Bill Wild
West show.
Although Gambling was illegal, a discreet barroom and casino were housed in separate building. Sporting wagers were the rage. The inn’s first golf pro went down in history for betting he could beat an opponent, with a fireplace poker for a putter. The pro won – although the amount of the bet is unrecorded. Green Park Inn in early times was so isolated that it was a self-sufficient community, with its own post office and resident physician. The hotel dairy provided milk and butter. Produce came from the inn’s fields. Ice was cut in winter from a nearby lake, then stored in sawdust under the hotel. In front of the imposing Porte cochere stood a life-sized, shimmery green horse and surrey. The owners had wearied of being reported to the local humane society for keeping their benighted animal in harness. Green paint finally convinced passersby that the horse wasn’t real. After close encounters with junkmen and pranksters, Green Park Inn’s realistic pacer remained parked and resplendent by the front entrance. The inn, at 1,300 meters (4,300 feet) being located on the Eastern Continental Divide, is directly over an under-hotel spring that is the source of the New River flowing into the Ohio, Mississippi and Gulf of Mexico- and the Yadkin, flowing directly to the Atlantic. This grand hotel in an improbable place Fifty years later, in the 1920’s hotel investors built a toll road – automobiles were charged $1.00; a horse with rider, 10 cents. Guests could travel by train from Lenoir and cover the last 29 Kilometers (18 miles) by cart in the dark. Listed in the national Register of Historic Places, it retains its wicker porch furniture, fan-cooled rooms and dignified presence of more than a century past. A high-minded Victorian dowager, dressed in crisp, white clapboard and leafy green ruching, like a fanciful brooch on the bosom of the Blue Ridge Mountains, she still beckons at the end of that winding, once-creekbed trail.
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(828) 295-3141 · greenparkinn@boone.net
