Empty Calories & Male Curiosity, #23
Travelogue #3: Sterling Brown’s “Paradise” ain’t got nothing on the Greenbrier Resort
QUICK HITTERS:
There are TONS of cool photos in this newsletter. So much so that it will not open properly in your email. Please view it at Substack.com or the Substack app for the full experience. If any of you non-tech people are struggling with that just reply to this email and I can help you.
Maverick’s book recommendation this week is Area 51, An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base, by Annie Jacobsen. Contrary to what you might think about this book upon reading its title, it is not about aliens. Jacobsen uses classified information and eyewitness interviews with former employees to lay out a massively interesting tale of the base. I picked this book for this particular week because the main story in GOING DEEP makes an appearance in it (The Greenbrier Resort).
Woke our little man up from a nap for this photo Earlier this week in the SilentPunt Podcast, Travis and I distilled our 45+ years of marriage (not to each other) into some keys for a healthy marriage. In OVERTIME, we talk about the challenges of creating new friendships as adults….
Please forward to a friend (or enemy for that matter) if they like to read….
Subscribe here if a friend forwarded this to you…and you like to read….
GOING DEEP:
Travelogue #3: Sterling Brown’s “Paradise” ain’t got nothing on the Greenbrier Resort
It was my love of history and golf that brought us to West Virginia recently. About fifteen years ago my wife called me from a work trip to tell me she thought I’d love the place she was staying: The Greenbrier Resort in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia.
The Greenbrier has one of the coolest backstories in American history, but we will get to that in a few moments. Because while I may have traveled to West Virginia for one particular story from history, as seems to happen, I ran into a few more.
The small town next door to White Sulfur Springs is Lewisburg, who have dubbed themselves “coolest little town in America.” After a half a day walking around it I would certainly agree. Our first stop was this awesome little independent bookstore, “A New Chapter.” I bought a book and pet a dog, win-win. Harper was a very good girl.
Next, I had a German beer at appropriately named Biergarten…not what I’d expect in rural West Virginia.
Then I saw it. One of those historical marker signs. The kind I love to read, but that my family usually realizes I’ve stopped to look at after they wind up several blocks ahead of me.
After reading the sign I excitedly walked several more blocks in hopes of finding more Civil War stuff. I was not disappointed. Lewisburg is part of a series of trails in Civil War-era towns where you can visit sites where history happened. It was very cool.
On to the star player in this newsletter: The Greenbrier Resort.
The Greenbrier was originally built in 1778 as a place of healing where visitors would soak in the natural mineral water springs for relief. By the 1830s it had become a “gathering place for politicians, judges, editors, lawyers, diplomats, ministers, planters, and merchants, primarily hailing from the Southern states.” 1 Then, during the Civil War years, it served as a military hospital.
The Greenbrier re-opened after the Civil War in 1865 and with the completion of the Chesapeake & Ohio (C & O) Railway became an even more visited destination. The modern era of the Greenbrier started in 1913 after the C & O purchased the site and developed the Greenbrier as it stands today. Situated a relatively short train ride away from the nation’s capital, since its inception the resort has been a destination for those looking to escape the summer heat and humidity. At an elevation of 2,000 feet the Greenbrier offered a respite from the stifling summer heat in eastern cities.
Aside from another brief stint as a military hospital during WWII, the Greenbrier continued to host Presidents and other politicians throughout the 20th century. This included President Dwight Eisenhower during his two terms in office (1953-1961). It was during his second term that Eisenhower approached the owners of the Greenbrier with a proposition.
The US government would provide the Greenbrier with $14 million for a new wing to the resort (called the “West Virginia Wing”). In exchange, the Greenbrier would allow the government to build a secret nuclear fallout shelter underneath the addition. Roughly the length of two football fields long and two stories tall, the shelter was designed to host members of Congress in the event of a nuclear strike on the eastern seaboard.
When the Cold War ended in the 1990s and the existence of the shelter came to light, there was public outcry over wasteful government spending. Initial reports talked of a secret underground bunker where our political leaders would live at a glitzy resort, while the rest of the surviving population suffered from radiation burns and poisoning.
As our tour guide informed us on our roughly 1 & ½ hour tour, this was absolutely not the case. While relatively large in scale, once filled to capacity with over a thousand people this shelter would’ve become cramped quite quickly. So much so that there was a secret stash of riot gear and weapons available should trouble arise.
Although cameras were not allowed into various areas of the shelter I was able to snap a few photos before getting into the main section:
The relatively nondescript room entrances below would’ve housed sessions of the House of Representatives (on the left) and the Senate (on the right). Note the capacities for each room (474 on the left / 124 on the right). This area was another that was hidden in plain sight, meaning civilians would’ve passed it occasionally. The builders of the bunker purposely made the seating capacity slightly larger than needed in an effort to conceal its actual purpose.
Former Governor of West Virginia (and current senator) Jim Justice purchased the Greenbrier in 2009 for the relatively small sum of $20 million. The sale was an effort to keep the property up and running as significant debts had it teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.
Unfortunately Justice has so far only seemed to delay the inevitable. When he purchased the resort Justice’s net worth was north of one billion dollars. Within a few years that was cut in half through poor business decisions and the still struggling resort. As of January this year his net worth now stands at zero….his debts exceed his assets.
While the future of the Greenbrier Resort may be in doubt, a sign I saw on the last day of our visit put that in perspective. I came across this random marker while walking the grounds:
At the top of this marker read the words, “The Great Buffalo Trail.” I read (and re-read) all the rest of the words but had to do some research on my own to make sense of them. In essence, this marker was placed there in 1916 and honors the great buffalo trails that lined this area prior to the white man’s arrival.
The buffalo are a herding creature and the trails that they made were followed by the Native Americans who hunted them. Once made, the trails became used by the Native Americans to navigate the area. If you’ve read anything about Daniel Boone and/or any of the other western frontier explorers, it was an area that took a lot of time and effort to hack their way through. The buffalo had, through their herding patterns, done the job of modern-day excavation.
These trails were later used for the development of the four main railways that connected the eastern states with the western ones (the western states at the time being states like Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky). So in essence, the same trails that the Native Americans used to sustain themselves through their hunting of the buffalo were used by white settlers (and eventually the US Army) to drive them off their lands.
I find it apropos that in the middle of this dying symbol of American imperialism, lies a marker that denotes a time gone by. Maybe in a hundred years there will be a marker for the Greenbrier.
IF YOU’VE MADE IT THIS FAR, PLEASE HIT THE ❤️ BUTTON SO OTHERS CAN FIND MY WRITING. Thank you!
I think Travis needs to work harder to make friends with the neighbor whose dog takes a crap on his front porch - friends are hard to come by, and he shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss him.
This is fascinating stuff! I just watched Paradise, so it's interesting to compare that to the Greenbrier Resort. And you're reading a book on Area 51? Seems like you're following a "Secret Government Projects" theme.