Black Rock Gap

People used to ride up to this mountain for their health. Blackrock Gap is at mile eighty-seven point four, and a mile below it, on the Valley side, were the mineral springs of a resort. A hotel stood at Black Rock Springs by the eighteen thirties. Just before the war, a partnership from New York bought it and changed the name to Union Chalybeate Springs. Union, in Virginia, in those years. The local historian Phil James figures that name may have doomed it, and it didn't last. In eighteen sixty its proprietor was offering a pleasant season at a celebrated watering place, board eight dollars a week, with rattlesnake hunting as an amusement. After eighteen eighty-five it came back bigger, with a three-story hotel, cottages, a bandstand and a three-lane bowling alley, and people came for picnics, marriage proposals and even baptisms. The neighbors worked it. Children from below Browns Gap carried buckets of butter five miles to sell to the kitchen. Ernest Via set up tenpins for ten to fifteen cents a night. Fire came three times. The last was in November of nineteen oh nine, a forest fire that took the hotel, its stables, its outbuildings and twenty-eight cottages, and burned the wooden bridges leading in. A rival's building nearby survived, and eventually took Black Rock's name. What was left was condemned and torn down by the time Shenandoah came, and very little sign of it remains. Older than the hotel is a legend, and it's told as one. In seventeen eighty-one, it says, Bernis Brown, a confidant of Governor Thomas Jefferson, hid the state archives and Virginia's Great Seal in a long-forgotten cave up over the Black Rocks, to keep them from the Redcoats. The water here still needs tending. The white rock at this end of the mountain can't neutralize acid rain, so its streams have suffered. The answer sounds made up. Rangers planned a helicopter drop of limestone on Meadow Run, near mile ninety, paid for with settlements from Clean Air Act violations. People came up this mountain to take the cure. Now it's a stream's turn, delivered by air. If you go looking for what's left of the springs, down the Paine Run Trail, Phil James has one warning. The aforementioned rattlesnakes, he wrote, still do not consider their pursuit as amusement.