Swannanoa, a Saturday Adventure
Old Virginia Luxury, in all its Ridiculous Beauty
It is amazing how many weird and cool places you can find around your own home state if you simply look hard enough. A couple weekends ago I found such a place, realized it was hecka cheap to visit, and brought the whole family there on a Saturday afternoon just for fun. The place is called Swannanoa Palace, and it is perched near the top of Afton Mountain near Waynesboro, and when I say weird and cool, I mean really weird and very cool.
A very little boy at the bottom of a very large staircase.
I found the place because I had been browsing CNN on a Friday, and I came across an article about abandoned architecture and what it means to us today. You know, the usual fluffy piece entitled something like “18 Abandoned Places that will Blow Your Mind.” Okay, that wasn’t the actual title but you get the idea. Anyway, as I flipped through the slideshow, a picture caught my eye. It was the front facade of an enormous Italianate mansion, and when I looked at the caption I was stunned to realize that the mansion in question was less than an hour away from where we live. A quick Google search revealed that the people who owned the mansion were doing an open house the very next day. And tickets were cheap.
So that Saturday, I whisked my family up to Afton without telling them where we were going. I saw a couple mouths gaping as we pulled into the front driveway of this gorgeous home, tucked away in the Blue Ridge on a site measuring at almost 600 acres of land. Some of that 600 acres is taken up by extensive gardens in back which ascend in elegant terraces until you are standing on a tall hill overlooking the rear of the house. The view is breathtaking.
Elizabeth was even dressed for the occasion (sort of, the dress is Edwardian, not Victorian, but whatever.)
A little history of the house is in order here. I will turn this over to my wife Elizabeth to explain, as she was the one who researched the home and its quirky inhabitants after we had left the place.
Stories say there was once a young confederate soldier named James Dooley who was injured in a battle, and sent to work in an ordnance base. While there he met and fell in love with a wealthy southern belle. He promised to build her a mansion on the top of a mountain. The couple were married, in spite of her father’s disapproval, and they settled in Richmond where they lived mostly happily ever after.
The whole life of James Dooley seems like a romantic fairy tale. His father was an Irish hat maker, and James himself was a soldier, lawyer, politician, as well as a railroad and steel tycoon. He and his wife, Sallie May, built the Maymont estate in Richmond. (We visited that a few years ago, and if you are ever in Richmond you need to take at least an afternoon to walk the gardens!)
The grand staircase.
It took most of his life to fulfill the promise of building his wife a mansion on top of a mountain, but the building was finally finished in 1912. The Dooleys had only a few years to spend their summers there before they died. They named it Swannanoa after Sallie’s love of swans. The Dooley’s were childless, and when James died he left the estate and several million dollars completely to his wife. When Sallie died she left the estate to two of James’ sisters, and the money to various charities and organizations—including a fund to build the Richmond library.
The marble fireplace in the foyer. Maj. Dooley personally selected and imported all of the marble for the house from Italy.
In 1926 the Dooley sisters sold the place to the Valley Corporation of Richmond, which turned it into a country club and golf resort. It is rumored that Swannanoa had the best distillery in the country and supplied the White House during Prohibition. But they closed the resort in 1932 and sold the estate back to the Dooley sisters. The sisters in turn sold it to a businessman named Dulaney. The mansion was then abandoned for 17 years.
In 1949 Swannanoa was leased to Walter Russell, a painter and sculptor who is rumored to have had ties to the Illuminati. He and his wife opened the University of Science and Philosophy, which is dedicated to spreading Russell’s theories of cosmic illumination. Mrs. Russell ran the school until the late 1980’s, after which it sat vacant again.
The current owner, James and Sandi Dulaney bought the estate from James’ grandfather in 2000, with plans to turn it into an event and conference center. They lived in the upper floors for a few years. However, the house is far too big for two people to care for adequately, and far too neglected to open for business. Now it is only open for photo shoots and weekend tours. It is not abandoned and yet it has been left behind.
Back to Nick: There are little nooks and hidey holes all over the place outside the house, as well as benches and fountains scattered here and there. Everything is in a state of beautiful, elegant decay. The marble steps shift a bit when you walk on them. The statues that should have adorned alcoves in the large fountain are missing. Spindles have fallen out of some railings like missing teeth, and there are vines and overgrowth everywhere.
Still, this is part of the charm of the place. It feels like something from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. Shade trees litter the whole place, stretching their arms into little side gardens, hanging over fountains that no longer bubble with any water. There is a sadness and a streak of mystery to the whole place, a house that could definitely hold the entrance to another world like a Narnia or Macdonald’s realm of Seven Dimensions. There is even a spooky, haunted-looking tower in the far back garden. Not sure what the tower was for, perhaps it was just a place to scope out the valley below.
Honestly, part of the fun of a place like this is trying to figure out what different things were for. Most things were obvious, but a few spots prompted some head-scratching. Like the pond in the rear, which is now so overgrown with kudzu and other weeds that we almost stumbled into it by accident. A stone bridge arches over this little pond, but even the bridge is so covered in ivy that it was hard to make out from far away. The current caretakers have done some mowing and restoration work, but it appears they are falling helplessly behind. Only a good deal of money lavished on the place in a concerted effort would bring it back to its glory days.
At the top of the garden terraces is a rose walk paved with brick and book-ended with matching concrete and marble pagodas. Only one of these pagodas is still open for the public to see. The other looks about to collapse under its own weight. Yellow tape ominously warns visitors to stay out. But the other is a neat little place all of its own. Even in the late summer heat, standing under the pagoda’s roof felt about five degrees cooler. The marble/concrete columns holding up the roof helped, as white marble stays remarkably cool when kept in the shade. The little ones all gathered inside to lie down on the brick floor and rest. That was when they discovered that the arched roof overhead echoed when they clapped and shouted, so they spent the next ten minutes clapping and shouting.
Next, we went inside the actual house. which I confess I did not get many pictures of simply because I had to keep a vigilant eye on the little ones to keep them from overwhelming the place. I know, silly to think that we could overwhelm a house with more than fifty rooms! But, somehow, we did, and we got shushed at least once by a tour director. Honestly, everyone had more fun outside the house, traipsing around to find all the fun little half-ruined garden structures, stairways, pathways, bridges, fountains, and porches.
Back to Elizabeth: While Nick was researching abandoned buildings on the Friday before we went to Swannanoa, I got an unexpected knock on the door, and found a UPS package on the porch. Nick’s cousin had sent me a historical re-enactment dress that she no longer wanted. Nick told me he had an adventure planned and that I should wear the dress. This is the dress you see in the pictures here. It was a wonderful adventure, and if you’re in the area you should go see it.
