A grand hotel in a railroad town

Second floor veranda overlooking the railroad tracks

Gordonsville was a railroad town on the junction of two lines, the Virginia Central Railroad and the Alexandria Railroad, when a grand hotel was constructed there in 1859.

My great-aunt frequented the elegant hotel during the heyday of passenger trains in the early 1900s on her way home to Culpeper from boarding school in Richmond.

Lucy Green Duncan, who was born in 1893, said passengers would get off the train and climb the outdoor staircase to the second floor veranda. She relayed that it was quite a social event there on the shady porches overlooking town as they waited for their connecting trains.

In the day, ladies and gentlemen traveled wearing their finest, and the hotel was a fitting setting. Inside the Georgian building, there is a central hall flanked by parlors with high ceilings. Dinners would go into the English basement for food and drink, and of course people who had longer waits or were on holiday could spend the night in the rooms on the upper floors.

It was in 1978 that I took my Aunt Lucy there. She was delighted that the building was still standing and in good shape, especially the verandas as she fondly recalled her times there. Historic Gordonsville, Inc. had acquired and began restoring the property in 1971. The Exchange Hotel was recognized and placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

The hotel opened in 1860 and it wasn’t long before it became the Gordonsville Receiving Hospital. Tens of thousands of casualties, both Confederate and Union, were treated there. The grand hotel became the place of unspeakable suffering.

During reconstruction, the building served as a Freedman's Bureau Hospital.  It was acknowledged as an African-American Memorial Site in 2002.

The war and its aftermath came and went, the railroads boomed, and this lovely building once again became a hotel with all its splendor and grandeur. These were the years my great-aunt told me about.

Today the Exchange Hotel houses a museum. As Virginia’s only standing Civil War Receiving Hospital, it has extensive exhibits on the Civil War, as well as railroad memorabilia and a gift shop.

Some people claim that the Gordonsville Exchange Hotel is haunted and indeed it does offer private ghostly tours at night.