The Greenbrier

The Greenbrier's story unfolds across three centuries and beneath two landscapes. The property began in 1778 as a simple bathhouse built around mineral springs discovered in the Allegheny Mountains of White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Guests arrived by carriage to soak in the purported healing waters, and by the early 19th century, the springs had drawn the wealthy, the ill, and the curious across the Eastern seaboard. Presidents slept in modest cottages, congressmen gambled, and the mineral waters generated their own mythology. Henry Clay visited repeatedly. Later, Robert E. Lee spent summers here during the Civil War's aftermath. The springs were marketed as cures for rheumatism, gout, and various ailments, a claim typical of 19th-century spa culture but which did little harm to the property's reputation or its ability to attract guests. By the 1880s, the original wooden structures had given way to more ambitious Victorian construction, but the property lacked a coherent architectural vision. It was a collection of cottages and buildings rather than a unified resort destination.

In 1913, the decision came to rebuild entirely. The owners contracted Frederick J. DeBuigne, who designed a Georgian revival main building of limestone and brick that still anchors the property today. The main casino and hotel building combines the formality of 18th-century colonial revival architecture with the scale and mechanical systems of early 20th-century industrial America. The facade is symmetrical and restrained, with columns and pediments that reference Mount Vernon and other Federal-era mansions, though the building's 400-plus-room footprint is far vaster than any 18th-century precedent. The interiors were originally trimmed in pale wood and period-appropriate furnishings, with a grand lobby featuring a coffered ceiling and a fireplace large enough to drive a car through. The ballrooms and restaurants were appointed with crown molding and plasterwork meant to evoke a genteel past. DeBuigne created a framework that could be reinterpreted as tastes changed, which proved crucial to the building's later evolution. The structural bones and room layouts have remained essentially unaltered since 1913, proof of the architect's understanding of how to build for durability and adaptability.

Dorothy Draper entered the picture in 1946, after World War II, when the property required substantial modernization and revival. Draper, already celebrated for her bold color work and dramatic interior schemes, approached The Greenbrier not as a historic preservation exercise but as an opportunity to enliven the past with color and pattern. She splashed the lobbies, corridors, and guest rooms with bold florals, chartreuse, coral pink, and emerald. Her signature florals appeared on wallpapers and upholstery. The effect should have clashed with the Georgian bones of the building, but instead it created a paradoxical space where 1913 formality met 1940s exuberance. The Draper rooms remain iconic and have been selectively preserved, while the property has continued to evolve its public spaces.

The Greenbrier's most extraordinary secret lay literally beneath the surface. During the Cold War tensions of the 1950s, the U.S. government built a massive fallout shelter carved into the mountainside below the hotel, commissioned to preserve Congress in the event of nuclear war. The bunker included meeting chambers, sleeping quarters, medical facilities, laboratories, and administrative offices sized and stocked to house and operate the legislative and executive branches for weeks or months. The facility was designed to be self-contained and independent, with its own power generation, water systems, and sealed entrances. The project, code-named Project Greek Island, remained classified until 1992, when the Washington Post revealed it to the world through the investigation of Ted Gup. For nearly four decades, guests had walked across lawns and through gardens above a facility designed to save the republic from atomic annihilation. Employees of the hotel were assigned as caretakers to maintain the bunker in constant readiness, a burden they kept secret even from their own families. The irony was profound and unsettling. Congress members who visited for leisure had no idea they were being groomed as potential occupants of an underground capital. Today, the Cold War Bunker operates as a public museum, accessible by guided tour, offering visitors a tangible connection to the anxiety of that era. The tour includes the original meeting chambers, sleeping pods, and equipment rooms, all preserved as evidence of mid-20th-century existential fear and governmental preparedness.

The National Historic Landmark designation in 1996 recognized both the integrity of the 1913 building and its subsequent evolution. The property has undertaken careful restoration of the main public spaces and certain guest room corridors where the Draper aesthetic is most intact, while modernizing private accommodations to current standards. The challenge has been to maintain the sense of continuous habitation and evolution that characterizes genuine historic properties, rather than fixing a moment in time under glass. The Greenbrier chose to honor the layers rather than erase them. The result is that you can trace the decisions of the property's stewards across a century: DeBuigne's proportions, Draper's color, the postwar expansions that added modern plumbing and HVAC, the careful interventions of the 21st century.

The 11,000-acre grounds and 700-room complex have naturally grown around the original building. The Old White Golf Course, originally designed in 1914 as an 18-hole course just beyond the main property, remains one of the oldest continuously operated courses in America and hosts two PGA events under the Greenbrier's aegis. Later additions include a newer Jack Nicklaus-redesigned course. The spa occupies what was once additional guest accommodations, reflecting a shift in how luxury resorts generate revenue and serve their guests. But the main 1913 building, with its Georgian envelope and Draper-inflected interiors, remains the symbolic heart of the property.

What makes The Greenbrier remarkable as a historic building is not that it was preserved in aspic but that it was inhabited and adapted thoughtfully across decades. The 1778 springs that started everything have receded from the marketing narrative, replaced by golf, casino gaming, dining, and spa services. Yet they remain central to the property's identity and legitimacy. The government bunker, once a humiliating secret, is now a public attraction that honestly grapples with Cold War paranoia. The Draper interiors, long dismissed as dated kitsch, have been re-evaluated as the work of a design visionary. The building has survived not because it was untouched but because it was continuously valued, renovated, and reimagined by owners and designers who respected its bones while refusing to be imprisoned by its past.

The Greenbrier stands as a National Historic Landmark because its architectural story documents the evolution of American leisure, modernism, and anxiety across the 20th century. The 1913 building is genuine and substantial. The Draper interiors are original and deliberate. The Cold War bunker is irrefutable and sobering. The property invites visitors not to a museum but to a living building that has belonged to its users and absorbed their needs, fears, and desires. That is the true mark of a historic structure that matters.