The Grove Park Inn is a historic resort hotel on the western-facing slope of Sunset Mountain within the Blue Ridge Mountains, in Asheville, North Carolina. The hotel has been visited by various Presidents of the United States.
In 1909, Edwin Wiley Grove and his son-in-law Fred Seely bought approximately 400 acres near Sunset Mountain to build a grand hotel.[3] After rejecting plans from several prominent architects, Seely (who had no formal training in construction or architecture) made his own sketch of the hotel, which Grove approved of. The hotel was built in less than a year by workers housed in tents on the job site. It opened on July 12, 1913. Acting U.S. Secretary of StateWilliam Jennings Bryan gave the keynote speech.[3]
Sketch of the exterior of the Grove Park Inn by Fred Seely, 1912
The original inn had 156 guest rooms.[4] The hotel was outfitted with furnishings from the Roycrofters of East Aurora, New York, and built of rough granite stones. It was advertised as having "walls five feet thick of granite boulders".[5] The resort’s golf course predates the inn. It was built in 1899 and redesigned by Donald Ross in 1924.[3] In the 1920s a young lady fell from a fifth story balcony at the inn and died on the palm court floor. The "Pink Lady" is the most notable of the hotel's ghost stories.[6][7]
During World War II, the inn was first used as an internment center for Axis diplomats.[8] The diplomats and their staff were allowed guarded trips to town, where they would purchase goods from the local merchants. This was a boon to the strapped local economy. The Inn was then used by the Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors. From 1944 to 1945, the hotel was an Army Redistribution Station where soldiers rested and relaxed before being assigned to other duties. The Philippine government functioned in exile from the Presidential Cottage (a replica of Anne Hathaway's Cottage) on the grounds during the war.[8]
View from Grove Park Inn, facing southwest
William Howard Taft resigned from the United States Supreme Court in the resort's Great Hall in 1930.[9] In the mid-1930s, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald moved to Asheville. Zelda would receive more formal care for her mental health while Scott lived at the inn for about a year, dealing with his mental health issues, heavy drinking, and tuberculosis. [10] Scott penned the classic book, The Great Gatsby.[11] Zelda was a creative person in her own right, including being a painter of note.[12]
In the mid-1950s, during the Cold War era, the location was seriously considered as a bunker site for the U.S. Supreme Court.[13] As of 2013, Supreme Court plans call for relocation to the Grove Park Inn in the event of a nuclear attack.[14]
The Grove Park Inn became part of Sammons Enterprises in 1955.[3] New owner Charles A. Sammons invested $100,000 in restoration work and the resort was expanded in 1958 and 1963. Sammons' wife Elaine occasionally snuck her dog into the hotel undercover in a baby carriage. Between 1982 and 1988, $65 million was spent to build a 50,000-square-foot sports center and the Sammons and Vanderbilt wings.[1] The new wings more than tripled the amount of guest rooms at the property.[4]
A $44 million, 3,700-square-metre (40,000 sq ft) spa was added to the property in 2001.[15] The resort had 900 employees as of 2009.[16] KSL Resorts acquired the Grove Park Inn in 2012 for $120 million and spent $25 million on renovation work.[9] They resold it to Omni Hotels in 2013. Omni spent $25 million to rehabilitate the property and renamed it the Omni Grove Park Inn.[17][3] In 2018, the Inn opened the Seely Pavilion, a 10,000-square-foot event venue.[18][19]
In 1992, the National Gingerbread House Competition began at the Grove Park Inn. The event continues to be hosted at the resort annually with finalists on display to the public in the halls each November and December.[20] The event has been canceled just one year, in 2024, due to the effects of Hurricane Helene.[21] The resort closed for a month and a half in October 2024 due to flooding in Asheville from the hurricane. The property lost power and water and experienced minor flooding.[22][23]
Relationship to the Biltmore Estate
View of the back of the Grove Park Inn
In 1917, four years after the completion of the inn's construction, Fred L. Seely purchased Biltmore Estate Industries from Edith Vanderbilt, wife of George Washington Vanderbilt II. The new venture came in addition to his responsibilities as the manager of the Grove Park Inn. E.W. Grove, his father-in-law and owner of the Grove Park Inn, had refused to sell the hotel to Seely, though he had eagerly allowed him to construct the building. He instead leased the hotel to Seely to manage and he did so until 1927, the year of Grove's death and the year Seely lost his legal bid to own the hotel. Grove left his hotel to his wife, son and daughter. Though Seely was married to his daughter, Grove made no concessions to Seely, and the inn passed into the hands of what one advertisement described as "more liberal management."[24]
Notable guests
U.S. Presidents
William Howard Taft – 27th President of the United States, stayed in 1929 and 1930
In Lee Smith's Guests on Earth: A Novel (which is about Zelda Fitzgerald and published in 2013), the central character often makes references to the Omni Grove Inn as the novel takes place in Asheville, North Carolina.
In Cormac McCarthy's 1979 novel Suttree (set in Knoxville), the title character and his girlfriend spend four days at the inn, staying in what McCarthy described as "a cool room high in the old rough pile of rocks."[28]
