The Grove Hotel

On these grounds in the mid-1770s stood a Georgian-style house in a grove of locust and aspen trees that for more than one hundred and forty-five years served the West Point community in many roles. Carter Braxton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a member of the General Assembly, occupied the house from 1777 to 1785 after his former home, Chericoke in King William County, burned in 1776. The house later passed to the Taylor family, whose property holdings included most of the town lots and were absorbed into farm properties known as the Taylor or West Point farm. When local entrepreneur Frank New purchased the house in 1856, it had been vacant for some time and was being used to shelter cattle and sheep. After major improvements, the hotel offered amusements and activities including monthly chandelier-lit ballroom dances where women wore colorful dresses with puffed sleeves and trains a yard and a half long, powdered their hair white, and sprinkled diamond and gold dust over it. The fenced yard included a dance pavilion, a bowling alley, and a lemonade well where five cents bought two large servings. New employed a band of musicians to serenade visitors on the train trip from Richmond, and upon arrival at West Point's train depot the band led guests to the hotel. Because fashion dictated that women avoid suntans, New built a bathhouse at the end of Main Street, now Beach Park, where women could bathe in the York River out of the sun and swimmers could swing into the water by a rope hanging from the ceiling. The hotel became the center of town life: Methodists, Baptists, and Episcopalians used its meeting room for services until their churches were built, another room served to distribute the town mail, and during the Civil War Confederate and later Union Army officers used it as their headquarters. Not long after the war, New and his wife Margaret died, the hotel entered a long decline under several owners, and it was destroyed in the fire of 1903.

West Point, Virginia · United States