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| 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.
