Grove Park Inn Resort

The hotel provides the public with little information about its history. Our team researches the hotel's past, from the very beginning, verifying its exact opening date and providing an overview of its history up to the present day.?If you have any useful information and would like to share it, please send it to archives@famoushotels.org.?Thank you This is what we know so far (attention: unverified history!): When noted orator and presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan delivered the keynote address at the opening of the Grove Park Inn in 1913, he was only the first of many prominent figures to spend time at the luxury resort nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Other guests have included Thomas Edison, Will Rogers, Henry Ford, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as several U.S. presidents. With distinctive granite boulder construction and undulating red clay tile roof, the inn captured the essence of the Arts and Crafts movement, its interiors filled with Roycroft furnishings and fixtures. Restored and expanded during the 1980s, the Grove Park Inn is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. "The idea was to build a big home where every modern convenience could be found, but with all the old-fashioned qualities of genuineness with no sham. All attempts at the bizarre, the tawdry and flashily foolish to be omitted," wrote Grove's son-in-law and co-developer, Fred L. Seely. Located nearly 2,500 feet above sea level, a grassy-mountain slope with panoramic views of the Blue Ridge Mountains lies undeveloped. The small, nearby city of Asheville, North Carolina, is beginning to flourish. The year is 1912, and Edwin W. Grove surveys the views from this breathtaking vista known as Sunset Mountain, and knows he has found the perfect location for his resort hotel As owner and founder of Grove's Pharmacy and Paris Medical Company of St. Louis, Missouri, Grove began spending summers in Asheville in the late 1800s under the advice of his doctor. The soothing, mountain climate acting as therapy for Grove's occasional bouts with bronchitis. Coming to love the Asheville area, Grove began to spend more time there, and became quite involved with the growth and development of the city His dream to build a resort hotel actually began in 1909, but it wasn't until July 9, 1912 that actual ground breaking took place. From there, the once barren hillside became a flurry of construction, using hundreds of mules, wagons, pulleys, and ropes to move granite stones--some of them weighing as much as 10,000 pounds. Workers from all over the South converged to be part of this extraordinary project, that in the end would become one of the finest resorts in the world. Words to Live By: Scattered throughout the massive lobby of The Grove Park Inn are quotes by notable authors, alongside quotes whose originators will forever remain anonymous. Each quote is etched into history on the stones that make up the lobby itself.