Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 21, 1995 TAG: 9503220093
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
``My eyes are bad and my hands shaky,'' Grandma - whose legal, if seldom-used name was Charlsie Crumpacker Lester Linkous - wrote in a wandering script, ``but my main concern is Yellow Sulphur Springs.''
Once a summer address for Confederate generals Jubal Early and P.G.T. Beauregard and visited by genteel Southerners from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Shore, Yellow Springs is a former spa on the outskirts of Blacksburg. In its heyday, it offered ballroom dancing, a bar, a bowling alley, fresh air and, of course, the supposedly healing waters of its spring.
One of dozens of health resorts that once flourished in the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia, it closed its doors in 1923.
Somehow, Grandma, who inherited the property in the 1940s, kept it breathing.
``I call it the oasis of Montgomery County,'' she told a reporter and photographer in 1991, while sitting on the porch of her cabin overlooking the rolling grounds, ``because this is the only place I know of where you can get away from everything.''
No more.
Grandma died a year ago. Her rambling, handwritten will is now in court.
Meanwhile, the man whom she had hoped would buy and care for the place is by no means sure he wants to.
And Grandma's heirs, for their part, say they haven't the energy or the means to look after the resort themselves.
Then there is the question of what could be done with the ramshackle old buildings anyway. ``The buildings have deteriorated over a number of years,'' noted one of Grandma's nephews, Joseph Samuels of Orange.
Indeed, Yellow Sulphur Springs - which local architect Gibson Worsham has called the best-preserved antebellum resort in the state - faces an uncertain future. Long held together by the will of one old woman, her death at 94 brought into the open a question widely whispered in the last years of her life: What would become of the old resort without her?
A year and a month after her death, it's still anybody's guess.
``I don't think anybody will tell you at this point what's going to happen, because nobody knows,'' said Edith Amend, one of the executors of Grandma's estate. ``It's still in litigation. It's just too early to say.''
For the short term, at least, the spa's fate lies in the hands of Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge Ray Grubbs - the man responsible for interpreting Grandma's scrawled-out will.
Grubbs must consider a number of thorny issues, say the parties involved (including a half dozen lawyers). Among the most ticklish, they say, are the matter of easements for roads, sewer and water lines to two cabins on the grounds that Grandma willed to their current tenants, and the meaning of certain terms and phrases she used.
For example. ``A fourth of the cash was left to Yellow Sulphur,'' explained Joseph Samuels, a nephew who lives in the central Virginia town of Orange. ``Well what's 'cash'?''
At the time of Grandma's death, she had almost half a million dollars to her name, court records show, divided among a checking account, stock and certificates of deposit.
There is also the problem of how to give the designated money to Yellow Sulphur Springs - a place obvious enough to those who walk its history-haunted grounds, but non-existent when it comes to writing out a check.
``There is no corporation, there is no entity,'' said Atwell Somerville, who represents nieces and nephews mentioned in Grandma's will, including Samuels. ``You just sort of tear your hair over that. ... Our aim is simply to have the court make an interpretation of the will.''
Meanwhile, Robert Smith Jr., who grew up on the resort - and whom Grandma had hoped would buy it - said he won't do anything until the judge makes up his mind.
``He [the judge] hasn't ruled on something like 10 critical questions,'' said Smith, who is now a businessman in Ohio. His father, Grandma's long-time companion Robert Smith Sr., still lives on the resort grounds and was one of the two tenants to be given a cabin and acreage in Grandma's will.
Last week, the younger Smith would only say that buying the resort is ``an option.'' He has declined to talk about what he might do with the resort if he does buy it.
But Smith said it is also possible the 60-acre resort will just be sold outright.
``It's pretty messy right now,'' he said. ``I can assure you nobody knows the answers at this point.''
Local artist Ray Kass, who once lived in one of the time-worn cabins at Yellow Sulphur, believes Smith has the resort's best interests at heart.
``He's trying to do the right thing,'' said Kass. ``If [Smith] buys it, and I hope he does, that at least gets it out of harm's way. ... The place just is swamped with historical importance. It's going to take a concerted effort to preserve it into the future.''
Once upon a time - say, a century ago - Yellow Sulphur Springs was hardly unique.
Mineral spring water was thought in those days to be good for a variety of ailments. The 19th century was an age of cholera and smallpox - when disease stalked the lowlands in the summer months and the gentry escaped to mountain resorts by the thousands. The spas were seen as healthy escape.
At one time, there were as many as 75 of the resorts in Virginia and West Virginia, historians say. There were four in Montgomery County alone - and Yellow Sulphur, which at its peak housed perhaps 300 guests - was not the biggest. The Montgomery White near Shawsville could handle 1,000 guests - and reportedly was visited by Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Civil War cavalry hero Col. John Mosby.
According to architect Gibson Worsham, who has written about the resort for Virginia Cavalcade magazine, Yellow Sulphur Springs was founded about 1800 by an entrepreneur named Charles Taylor, who erected a few cabins.
By the 1880s, the resort boasted a ballroom, bowling alley, a large hotel -since burned - and three rows of cabins.
Here, a couple of winding miles off U.S. 460, ex-Confederate generals Jubal Early and P.G.T. Beauregard once kept summer cabins. They are alleged to have planted some of the maple trees that still adorn the grounds.
It was at Yellow Sulphur Springs that the board of visitors met to choose the first president of what was to become Virginia Tech.
Charlsie Lester visited the spring on Sundays as a little girl. In a 1981 interview with this newspaper, the woman by then known as ``Grandma'' recalled riding out from Blacksburg in a surrey as a girl of 7. She listened to a band play on the hotel porch, and stared amazed at the women in their long dresses and the gentlemen in tails.
``I didn't think there was any place but Yellow Sulphur Springs,'' Grandma said. ``I still don't.''
In fact, the spa in those days was already doomed. Faith in the medicinal powers of mountain spring water was on the wane; Yellow Sulphur and most of the other mountains resorts were fated to go out of business. Yellow Sulphur closed its doors in 1923.
Grandma's father, Charles Crumpacker, a local farmer, businessman, and one-time chairman of the Montgomery County board of supervisors, eventually bought the resort at auction. She inherited it in 1940s.
Aside from selling part of the acreage - about 60 of the original 160 acres remain - and tearing down one of the hotels for safety reasons, Grandma spent the next half century preserving the site of her childhood memories from harm.
Though her first husband, dentist James Lester, died in 1956 (a brief second marriage in the 1960s also ended with her husband's death), Grandma soon proved she could fend for herself. In the 1991 interview, she recalled hearing wildcats screaming on the Yellow Sulphur grounds at night.
She also recalled poachers. Upon hearing gunshots, she said, she thought nothing of grabbing up her long-handled pistol and heading out to shoo the hunters away, even after midnight.
``I was crazy,'' she laughed. ``I'd take that pistol, and go up there when I heard them shooting. They'd say, `We're sight-seeing.' I'd say, `At midnight?' I was a tough customer. I reckon that's the reason I'm still alive.''
She soon acquired the nickname that preceded ``Grandma'' - ``Pistol-Packin' Mama."
``She was a character. And delighted in being one,'' recalled a niece, Dorothy Smith of Alexandria. ``I miss her terribly.''
The grounds of the resort today include a 19th-century hotel - its exterior and porches partly restored by a $19,000 state grant several years ago - three rows of cabins, most of a bowling alley and a few other cabins and outbuildings. A gazebo over the spring was restored in the early 1990s, with benches, by Yellow Sulphur residents who also have restored some of the cabins.
Some of the cabins are rented. Tenants - there are usually a dozen or so, often Virginia Tech students or artists - pay a minimal rent, in return for which they are expected to help keep the place up.
Worsham, a long-time advocate of the resort and a student of its history, has long lived in a cabin there with his family. In Grandma's will, Worsham, like Robert Smith Sr., is given his cottage and two acres of land.
Worsham currently is working in Richmond. He declined to be interviewed for this article.
Robert Smith Sr. recently told a reporter that the months since Grandma's death have been ``an ordeal.'' He also said his personal wish is that the resort, with its quiet, tree-shaded grounds, can be made into a home for retired veterans.
Smith said he never talked to Grandma about money or finances, and did not see her will before she died.
``If I'd seen it,'' said Smith, 80, ``I'd have known that will was for the birds.''
August 4, 1991
I, Charlsie C. Lester Linkous, being in sound mind declare this to be my last will and testament. First, I revoke all previous wills. My eyes are bad and my hands shaky, but my main concern is Yellow Sulphur Springs. I have given 50 years of my life restoring the place and spent a lot of money and I want it to remain an oasis of Montgomery County. I want the cottage in which R.F. Smith lives with 2 acres back of the cottage deeded to him. I want the cottage that Gibson and Charlotte Worsham live in to be deeded to them with 2 acres back of cottage. I want R.F. Smith Jr. Bobby to have the rest of Yellow Sulphur Springs with 54 acres for one half of assessed value. I'm sure he will keep it as a Historic Landmark as I have. This has always been his home and he loves it like I do.
I'm writing a list on a separate page about the way I want my personal property to go...
I hope to finish this letter but I'm too tired now. I'm anxious to sign this about Yellow Sulphur.
Signed
Charlsie C. Lester Linkous
by CNB