Washington County News
Thursday, May 2, 1968
page 9
(Editor’s note: Glenrochie may be known today as a home for tired businessmen and a hideaway for golfers whose bosses are out of town. There was a time in a more carefree age, though, when its rocky glens echoed to the refined voices of elegant young ladies in maxi-skirts. Then, as now, the town of Abingdon wooed Glenrochie. Then, as now, the town was spurned. Here is the first of three articles on how Glenrochie came to be. It’s good reading.)
Glenrochie past makes today’s suburbanites seem pale
by Meade Campbell
The Popular Glenrochie Country Club with its tough nine-hold golf course also sports two asphalt tennis courts, a festive club house, a somewhat abandoned ski run, and a swimming pool with patient life guards, who specialize in teaching the young how not to drown so they can grow up to be replacements. It is a pleasure dome decreed in 1955 by certain restless citizens tired of going to each others houses or to far flung places like Saltville and Bristol for entertainment.
It is located on one of the wooded knobs south of Abingdon, once a part of “The Meadows,” the 700-acre farm of Wyndham Robertson, Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, who, upon the resignation of Governor Tazewell, became Governor in 1836.
The name “Glenrochie” is sometimes, perhaps logically, said to be an Indian name, but it isn’t. It is a Scottish transposition of “Rocky Glen,” an apt description for this rugged darned terrain, that has long been a place of merriment. As Camp Glenrochie it offered even more diversion than now, such as horseback riding, riflery, archery, canoeing, basketball, baseball, theatricals, handicrafts, china painting, afternoon tea, and of course, camping.
Its genesis was a guest explosion at the always hospitable “The Meadows.”
In the summer of 1901, there were four more guests than beds or floor space for pallets and the simple solution was to pitch a tent in the back yard to accommodate the Misses Louise and Nellie Bowman of Lynchburg and Elizabeth and Gay Lloyd of New York. They were so pleased with the arrangement that they refused to return to the house when there was again room for them and almost refused to leave at all. They were the first campers. They returned the next summer with two more friends and the next with two more and another tent had to be pitched.
Mary Robertson Reade, daughter of Captain Frank Robertson (then heir to The Meadows) and the wife of Willoughby Reade, teacher of literature at Episcopal High School at Alexandria, spent summers at her home, and was responsible for inviting the overflow in the first place. After the first summer she began to call the tent traffic a “Summer School in Virginia Mountains, Camping a Feature,” and made it a commercial enterprise.
The 1904 brochure states that ten boarding students could be accommodated and that “only such restrictions as a careful mother would exercise will be imposed upon the girls.” They slept in the tents or in the house as their disposition or the weather directed, but Mrs. Reade specified that they must never return from town in the evenings unchaperoned and that after dark the girls must be on porches or in parties on the grounds and that tete-a-tetes were discouraged. Encouraged on the other hand was “reading of substantial literature and papers, but there is no rule in the matter.”
Lawn tennis was played in a grove by the young ladies, wearing hats, veils and maxi-skirts. At the proper time, panting young swans from town were invited for tea at the tennis court. It was expected that they arrive at this proper time, and leave at the next proper time, and there was no equivocation about this. They did as they were told.
In 1905 a clay court supplanted the grass one and the girls could avail themselves of tennis suits in the school colors, pale gray with a crimson S. S. monogram on the blouse and “pale gray hats which are very attractive and made to order by a Northern house.”
The diet was healthy and thoughtfully designed to nourish and strengthen, Mrs. Reade said, adding that “at eleven every morning the spring house is opened and the girls may have an unlimited supply of milk to drink.”
The students were offered instruction in oil painting, water colors, china painting, pyrography (all right, wood-burning), violin, piano, in addition to literature, history and nature study taught by Miss Gay Blackford of Mrs. Lefebre’s School, Baltimore.
This regimen required one hour a day and three if desired. Nobody seemed to desire. By 1907, Mrs. Reade was telling her prospective students that it was not too much to ask to anyone born with a brain that they exercise it for a one hour a day, but the students were more interested in horses.
Riding had become the major attraction. Mrs. Reade made it plain in her brochures that she preferred the girls to ride astride and too bring along for this purpose a divided skirt, but if they insisted on the more genteel side saddle, they had better soild well be good enough to keep the horses from getting saddle sores, or not ride at all. It was also told to them that they must always ride with some member of the family or reliable groom and that boys were never allowed to accompany them on rides, although they were always welcome for tea and tennis or to dance by the big graphophone at night, under chaperonage.
By 1911 the school idea was abandoned. The establishment, grown too big for the back yard, was moved to a nearby meadow, then to the location of the present Country Club and was officially named Camp Glenrochie.
After the death of Mary Robertson Reade and the later marriage of Willoughby Reade to Miss Nan Griffin of Bedford, shingle oak structures of various shapes and sizes began to appear on the Glenrochie hills. There was the Captain’s cabin reserved always for the current camp directors, several multi-purpose ones here and there, and a large one housing a kitchen, a room commodious for rainy day reading, mandolin strumming, theatrical productions or whatever seemed pleasant or necessary, and a screened porch for dining. This is the site of the Glenrochie Club House. Down in front overlooking the riding ring and stables was a gazebo. The patio now there overlooks the wind-up of the ninth hole and is used as the nineteenth. The blue Clinch mountain is still there. Behind the tennis courts was a large vegetable garden and up the path a way is still the home where Cal Black, the caretaker, lived.
The campers lived in a semi-circle of white tents on board floors on what was known throughout the camp’s existence as “tent row” that would along to the top of the hill to the Infirmary.
A registered nurse was always a member of the staff, one “whose theory is that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Perhaps because of this outlook, medical care was rarely a problem at Camp Glenrochie. In case of emergency the brochures tell that “There is a well equipped modern hospital in Abingdon with a registered surgeon. This hospital is a branch of the well known Johnston-Willis Sanitarium at Richmond, Virginia.
A stage, a horse drawn vehicle, that is, was available to transport the campers from and to the depot, the uninclined horse riders to picnics, and everyone for three day stays at Glenrochie’s cabin on the Holston River.
Here is a list of personal essentials in the first decade of Camp Glenrochie: Two heavy blankets, six single sheets, four pillow cases, one dozen towels, raincoat or cape, Bloomers, riding skirt, preferably for cross saddle, a warm kimona, pair of stout boots, overshoes, umbrella, two short skirts, middy blouses (two dark ones) sweater or heavy coat, and two laundry bags.
Watch next week for the next exciting chapter of Camp Glenrochie as it enters the roaring twenties and glamorous thirties.