Inn country
Graves Mountain Lodge preserves family traditions of hospitality

by Lee Graves
for Virginia Business
October 2007

Time hasn’t exactly forgotten the valley around Graves Mountain Lodge.

Change aplenty has come since Jimmy Graves’ ancestors ran an inn along the turnpike that once snaked over the crest of the Blue Ridge.

But the pace of that change has moved at a tempo that hasn’t left tradition and family living in the dust.

Guests can access the Internet on high-speed connections, but they might have to be patient for a dish of peas to make its way around one of the wooden dinner tables.

They can pick new, exotic varieties of apples in the orchards, but they’ll find that the apple pie tastes as down-home as fresh spring water.

“We haven’t changed a whole lot,” says Graves, who is 70. “We’ve added new accommodations — cottages and things like that, but we have pretty much stayed the same.

“A lot of people like that. When they were kids, the barn was here,” he said, gesturing. “They come back, and the barn is still here.”

Bonnie Gordon of Charlottesville can relate. Her family started coming from Alexandria to the lodge in Madison County when she was 4, and now she brings her own three children.

“It’s so funny to see my kids talking to the pigs,” she says, “because I remember talking to the pigs, too.”

That sense of comfortable country living is a hallmark of the hospitality at Graves Mountain Lodge. Though the motels and the main lodge have sprung up since the 1960s, the family’s tradition of providing for guests dates back generations.

“We’ve been keeping people since the early 1800s,” says Graves.

He and his wife, Rachel, have grown the business into a celebration of music, agriculture, horticulture, natural beauty, outdoor recreation, simple living and family ties.

“It’s a great place for multi-generations,” Gordon says.

“Everybody can go do their own thing and then come back and have dinner together.”

One of the distinctive traditions at the lodge is the family-style dining. Folks pass around heaping helpings of the day’s entrée — be it country ham, fried chicken, rainbow trout or roast beef — and dishes of homegrown vegetables.
After a meal, it’s tempting to sit a spell on the lodge’s patio, savor the view of Graves Mountain and listen to the Rose River rush on its way to the Rapidan.

At times, though, the grounds bustle with crowds, such as during the bluegrass Festival of Music every spring and the Apple Harvest Festival every fall.

The latter, held the second and third weekends of October, draws 10,000 to 12,000 people a day for hayrides, horse riding, apple-picking, apple-eatin’, guitar-picking, trout fishing and more.

When there’s not a festival, peace and quiet reign, providing a retreat from the hustle of the workaday world.
Businesses find the seclusion attractive for meetings.

Clients range from Luck Stone, a Goochland County-based crushed stone company, to the Vibration Institute, a high-tech nonprofit corporation based in Chicago.

“We find that a lot of places like to have the meetings here because cell phones don’t work here. That way they can have a meeting without being interrupted,” Graves says.

The newest addition to the Graves Mountain complex provides five rooms designed for business meetings. At the other end of the spectrum, there are more than a dozen cabins and cottages, some romantically rustic in the tradition of the family’s Honeymoon Hut.

That cottage, now gone, originally existed on property that in the 1930s was sold to help create Shenandoah National Park.

Now, the park complements the outdoor options around the lodge. White Oak Canyon and Old Rag Mountain top the list of hiking destinations, and fly fishermen can probe the upper reaches of the Rose and several other nearby trout streams. The state-run Rapidan Wildlife Management Area provides additional fishing and hunting opportunities.

Gordon’s family is big on hiking — and swimming and apple picking and music. She is an assistant professor of music at the University of Virginia, where her husband, Manuel Lerdau, is an environmental scientist.

“We’re college professors, so we don’t have a lot of money,” she says. “It’s still quite economical.”

Well, prices have gone up. A newspaper article from 1970 lists breakfast for $1.60, lunch for $1.75 and dinner for under $4. You’ll pay $9.25 for breakfast now and more for other meals.

But nothing has changed since that writer described the big platters of meat and deep dishes of vegetables passed around family-style:

“You just dig in. When a platter or a dish becomes empty, it’s refilled. You dine until you pop.”

To go
Graves Mountain Lodge is on about 1,700 acres in Syria in Madison County. The farm has about 100 acres of apples, 20 acres of peaches, a cannery and stables for horse rides.

In addition to the bluegrass, apple harvest and Spring Fling festivals, the lodge holds special activities for Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, July Fourth and Thanksgiving. The lodge is closed from the weekend of Thanksgiving until mid-March.

Accommodations range from rooms in one of the motels to rustic cabins and rental houses.

For more information, call (540) 923-4231 or go to www.gravesmountain.com.