Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 26, 1995 TAG: 9511270064
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALLISON BLAKE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
Sam Tollison of Riner made his way to the front of the crowded room, surrounded by china plates and old fans and walnut bureaus and boxes stacked with fading gilt frames.
"Hey, Carl," he said. "Where's the wooden bowling ball and tenpins?"
Carl McNeil, whose McNeil Real Estate would be handling the day's auction, rounded a cluttered table and directed Tollison to the ancient wooden balls and pins.
"I don't think I'll ever see anything like it again," said Tollison, leaning down to examine the remnants of a 120-year-old bowling alley.
How much are they worth?
"We're going to find out," McNeil said.
At 9 o'clock sharp, the auctioneer's singsong rang out, and somebody bought a glass hurricane lamp for $12.50. So commenced a rather historic event: the third auction of the contents of the Yellow Sulphur Springs Hotel.
The first, during the Civil War, found the nuns from a nearby Confederate hospital purchasing almost everything from the antebellum spa outside Christiansburg. The second, during the 1940s, came nearly 20 years after the last of the old resort's three hotels closed for good, and cleaned out nearly all of the old bedsteads and such.
The third auction saw sharp-eyed dealers and local residents alike, folks who wanted something from one of the magic places in Montgomery County. They bid on the few hotel remnants that survived the last auction - washing bowls and pitchers, for instance - as well as the newer inhabitants of the surviving hotel. These were the family belongings of Charlsie Lester, who bought the place in 1943 and lived there until she died two years ago at age 94.
She had adapted the hotel for use as something of a personal attic, where she stowed the contents of her family and forebears' various homes.
For $120, Tollison bought the bowling pins and balls from the abandoned alley, which still sits out in the woods on the faded resort's 60 acres.
"I only wanted to pay about $60," he admitted from his seat about halfway back in the Holiday Inn's ballroom. Wife Marge, he said, thought they'd be "a good interest piece."
"I would have bought those bowling balls if Mr. Tollison hadn't been bidding," friend Paul Duncan said later.
Raised in Pilot, Duncan says he'll never forget an outing to Yellow Sulphur Springs on a fall day when he was about 8.
"My great-great-uncle was a caretaker over there in the hotel. It was the first time I ever bowled in my life. A Walters family reunion," he said.
There was a jail inside the old hotel - the one that was torn down in the '40s - and the little boy had nightmares thinking about being locked up inside.
The mystique of the place seems indisputable to the kids who've known it. Ginny Browne of Stanley, great-niece of Lester, went there as a child and later as a student at Radford University, and perhaps as much as monthly in the years since then.
"It was incredible," she said. "There's just so much history there."
And it was always fun to visit beloved Aunt Charlsie, who "always had a story and a remembrance."
On a later generation's visits to Yellow Sulphur, "we would wander through the woods to the old bowling alley," said 18-year-old Brad Holsinger, another member of the family.
"It's just straight out in the middle of nowhere."
Family heirlooms went on the block, including a coveted pie safe "made by Aunt Charlsie's Grandfather Crumpacker," according to Browne.
Ed Truett bought it. He seemed flush over his $2,425 purchase more than an hour later.
"It's beautiful," said Truett, who, with his wife, Dolores, went to Virginia Tech and now operates Golden Oak Antiques in Cloverdale. "It's a Montgomery County, 12-tin pie safe. Early brass. Pitsaw marks, so you know it's pre-Civil War."
According to her husband, Dolores wrote about Charlsie Lester and her long life at the abandoned resort for the "Collegiate Times," the student newspaper at Tech, in the late '70s. They feel a connection to the place.
The pie safe was one of the day's prizes.
"I've paid more before for them," Truett said. "But not to keep. You can't just set a limit when you go to auction and say you'll just spend $1,700. How do you know you can't get it for $1,705?"
Seated in the middle of the room was a man with his son who had considered what he'd spend at this auction but kept his own counsel concerning the amount. When the moment came, he raised his white card and bid furiously on a bulky writing desk that once stood in the lobby of the hotel building Duncan remembers from childhood - the one torn down in the '40s. It's been stored in the single remaining hotel ever since.
Gibson Worsham, an architect who's lived in one of the cottages on the resort's grounds for years, and inherited his cottage from his friend Charlsie Lester, wanted that table.
He got it for $875.
"So it'll just stay at the place," Worsham said. "That's what matters. I just didn't want it to go on the market."
Plenty of other heirlooms from the sale won't wander far, either.
"A lot of folks want something from the old hotel," said Larry Linkous. "All of it at least was stored there. It's just the romance of buying from the Yellow Sulphur Hotel. And if you put it in your home and tell somebody it came from Yellow Sulphur Hotel ... it did."
He bought a barrel butter churn - "so I have something."
Throughout nearly five hours of bidding, a white-haired woman sat in the front row. Edith Allen Amend of Luray, executor of the estate of her Aunt Charlsie, bid $75 on a doll under glass. She lost. It had belonged to her aunt during her girlhood.
After the auction, the resort, with its aging hotel, remaining cottages, and even its bowling alley, will be sold. A gentleman named in the Lester will has first option to buy.
But as she watched Saturday's proceedings, Amend wasn't worried about the contents of the hotel.
"I got emotional when things belonging to blood family" go up for bid, she said. "It's sort of the end of an era."
by CNB