Kevin Tucker, chief curator at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, dives into the rustically-styled architecture of the Grove Park Inn and the Mountaineer Inn — two iconic Asheville lodging establishments.
Story by Kevin W. Tucker | Photographs by GROWL
“Think of your own faults when you are awake, and the faults of others when you are asleep.”
— Chinese proverb painted on fireplace stone at the Grove Park Inn, 1913
“Home Away From Home … Sit a Spell … Cement Pond … WIFI”
— Entry sign at the Mountaineer Inn, 2021
Asheville, North Carolina, has long been a destination city — for its location in the midst of scenic mountains and forests that were just as appealing two centuries ago as today. Edith and George Vanderbilt’s construction of their own estate, Biltmore, dramatically underscored the region’s appeal at the very end of the 19th century, but even before building their grand home, they experienced the city as others might, by staying in one of its hotels.
Prompted by the arrival of train service to the city in the 1880s, tourists from around the region and country flocked to the city, and their numbers only grew as connecting roads did, too. With each decade, trains and automobiles brought ever greater numbers of visitors, from the wealthy to the working classes, seeking restorative cures in fresh air or simply the enjoyment of this way station to nearby places of natural mountainous beauty. One did not need to have the wherewithal of a Vanderbilt to make Asheville their own retreat, whether as a home or just for a brief escape from the world.
Even as its mountain setting and restful vistas distinguished it, Asheville was one of countless American cities experiencing the rising impact of the new mobility afforded by ownership of an automobile. As early as 1899, Asheville and Buncombe County recognized future opportunities by adopting North Carolina’s Good Roads Movement to encourage the development of roads to increase tourism. By the 1950s, the federal expansion of the interstate highway system meant that the vast number of car-centric motels across the United States dominated travel planning as no other roadside structures had ever done.
Over the course of the first half of the 20th century, what was rural became suburban as dozens of motels began to line these roads to and from the city, vying for motorists’ attention either by way of distinctively themed architecture or, more often than not, through signs lined in electric neon.
It’s a scene that lingered into my childhood and memories of my family’s road trips. I knew any restlessness I felt while cramped in the back seat of the car would be set aside as soon as I saw the towering roadside sentinel’s neon glare. Offered up as an electric token proclaiming the romance of travel, the signs were often in the shape of a thunderbird, a Polynesian tiki, or another mascot appropriated from the region or, alternately, distant lands. We had arrived.
The particular smell of those motel rooms — a mix of cleaning solution and the cold dew that lingered from the first blast of air conditioning — remains etched in my mind. Launching myself from the back seat of my parents’ car, the oversize diamond-shaped tab of the keychain still swaying from the lock, it was a singular thrill to be first to enter that room in its seemingly pristine state. The furniture in the room offered a manufactured version of the trappings of home — the comforter on the bed equally homey and synthetic.
Travel and its appeal as a touchstone for memories is something that remains universal across generations. Hotels and motels are sites of those shared but distinct memories. From my own escapes to Asheville in recent decades — rounding the curve in the road on Sunset Mountain to suddenly capture the sight of the Grove Park Inn’s undulating, thatchlike roof, or looking past an accumulation of other hotels, restaurants, and gas stations to see the towering sign of the Mountaineer Inn stake its own roadside claim — these places called to my curiosity in how they had spoken to a continuum of visitors across generations. Though they share a common language as lodgings in a rustic style, their dialect is as distinctive as their histories.
Upon its completion in 1913, Asheville’s iconic Grove Park Inn, a hotel built at the behest of pharmacist and entrepreneur Edwin Grove, would become the supreme Southeastern example of a grand mountain resort. As author Bruce Johnson notes in Built for the Ages: A History of the Grove Park Inn, 408 acres of property were secured on the northern side of the city to build what Grove foretold would be “a hotel so different from anything in the mountains of North Carolina, and which will appeal to the people on account of the hotel and surroundings being so restful.” The winking rusticity of Grove Park and its antecedents, including Yellowstone’s Old Faithful Inn, had the appeal of a simple lodging, but fashioned in Herculean proportions — right down to the inn’s cavernous great room with its twin fireplaces made to burn 10-foot logs and formed by granite boulders weighing more than 10,000 pounds.
In contrast to roadside tourist camps, these massive inns, in both construction and imagery, were a testament to their designers’ vision as places hewn from mountainsides. As visitors walked in, they felt as if they were entering a place as ancient, enduring, and elementally connected to the land as the rocks themselves — while having the latest conveniences. This duality reflects the desires of guests past and present for an escape into the wilderness and a wish to keep the trappings of modern life nearby.
The Grove Park Inn was constructed in 1913 at the behest of pharmacist and entrepreneur Edwin Grove. In its expressive use of stone, copper, and oak, it was designed in keeping with the American Arts and Crafts movement, which endorsed a simple way of life.
Fred Seely, the inn’s designer and Grove’s son-in-law, was the conduit by which the hotel embraced both its mountainous site and the character of the then-popular American Arts and Crafts movement. The movement — which endorsed the spiritual and physical benefits of the “simple life” by celebrating nature and handcrafted goods of local materials — impacted other aspects of Asheville’s early-20th-century culture and architecture. In 1901 social progressives Eleanor Park Vance and Charlotte Louise Yale moved to the city and began what subsequently became, through the assistance of Edith Vanderbilt, Biltmore Industries, a craft education program for local young men and women. In 1917 Seely purchased Biltmore Industries and created new woodworking and textile workshops adjacent to the inn (in a style mirroring that of the inn itself), furthering an association with the movement in a living way beyond the stylings of a building. From what were once crafts of necessity to new generations of trained artisans producing work for visitors, such endeavors — along with later regional developments including Black Mountain College and the Penland School of Craft — rooted the city’s legacy as a hub for artists that endures today. Even so, evidence of the movement’s architectural influences in Asheville were many, too, including in homes designed by architect Richard Sharp Smith, supervising architect for Biltmore Estate and Village and the designer of the Young Men’s Institute Building, which served the city’s African American communities. From bungalows and English-style cottages in Chestnut Hill to grander houses built adjacent to the Grove Park Inn, the preference for local materials of hewn timber and rock, ruddy tilework, warm earthy colors, and styles that emphasized a quaint simplicity must have been seen as especially fitting in this Blue Ridge mountain setting. Seely would later build his own home — known locally as “Seely’s Castle” for its fortified appearance, large scale, and mountaintop location — less as an homage to the more modest virtues of the Arts and Crafts movement than as an overscaled statement of medieval rusticity in the vein of the inn’s great hall.
For the Grove Park Inn’s hall, Seely had inspirational quotes painted on the rocks at the hearth, drawing from the lessons of his friend and Arts and Crafts impresario Elbert Hubbard of East Aurora, New York, whose Roycroft artisans produced a number of the inn’s furnishings. Hubbard, a soap company executive turned social critic and lifestyle guru, was one of the leading mouthpieces for the rural lifestyle extolled by the Arts and Crafts movement by way of his own pithy aphorisms and handcrafted books, metalware, furniture, and other articles.
“Be not simply good — be good for something,” guides one stone dedicated to the words of Henry David Thoreau. “The sun will shine after every storm,” encourages Emerson. And through the dialect of Georgia’s first poet laureate, Frank Lebby Stanton, one reads what ultimately became his epitaph decades after the inn opened. “This world we’re livin’ in is mighty hard to beat. We get a thorn with every rose, but ain’t the roses sweet.” The message seemed inescapable for the visitors who came to Asheville for the fresh air and mountain views.
If the Grove Park’s vistas, rough rock walls, simple but sturdy oak furniture, and hammered copper failed to underscore that guests were to leave the complexities of urban life behind, then such evocative, moralizing messages were yet another reminder of this quest for a life well lived. Even so, such yearnings for Emersonian thought celebrating nature, individualism, and the “simple life” were too often detached from the reality of those living in poverty throughout rural Appalachia. For them, the trappings of grandly “rustic” buildings provided no fantasy escape to leisure or romantic connections to a nostalgic notion of a simple life.
While the Grove Park Inn, built in the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement, reflected an earlier romanticization of “roughing it” in Appalachia for wealthy visitors to Asheville, motels later encapsulated how travel across the United States may have become by degrees more modern and democratic through the decades while Americans still embraced a nostalgia for a variety of past stereotypes. The Mountaineer Inn, constructed with a homey, cabinlike facade of stone and logs and adorned with neon caricatures, calls attention to the particular time-capsule state of its buildings. From the road, one can’t miss the monumental neon figure of its barefoot namesake carrying folksy announcements of “feels like family” or “tasty vittles” — one such sign of the times either nostalgically familiar or oddly displaced for the memories of generations of travelers.
As automobile tourism continued to expand during the 1930s, motels rapidly began to line major routes around Asheville, covering from the north to the east. Even Harland Sanders, the self-realized mascot of Kentucky Fried Chicken, sought to capitalize on the city’s location by purchasing an Asheville motel and cafe north of the city and dubbing it Sanders Courts in 1939. Not long afterwards, the Mountaineer Court was built as one of the newest eastward additions to a growing host of motels along U.S. 70.
For over half a century, from his purchase of the then-redubbed Mountaineer Inn in 1964 to his death earlier this year, Greek émigré Chris Moutos served as the proprietor of the Mountaineer. Photographs of Moutos and recollections by his son all reflect an aging and fiercely proud restaurateur-turned-hotelier who moved to the United States in 1951, traveling from Savannah to Greenville and, ultimately, Asheville. In 1963, he opened the Acropolis with his brother, Jim, located just across the street from the Mountaineer Inn and advertising specials of his own Greek salad, all-you-can-eat Italian spaghetti for $1, and shish kebab for $2.
Before Moutos purchased the inn, former owners had added a two-story wing of rooms to the south of the 20 original cabins and replaced the original “Mountaineer Court” road sign with the towering neon sign that remains today. One of Moutos’ sons, John, says that the sign — weathering decades of relocation and repairs — has required a great deal of specialized attention to keep it in operating condition. He fully appreciates how the giant shoeless, rifle-holding, tobacco-smoking, straw-hat-wearing figure, along with the family of other cartoonishly rustic figures dotting the inn’s roof, are stereotypes of another era. In staying in a version of these buildings, visitors would adopt, by proxy, the purportedly more noble associations of a connection to the undeveloped land, independence, and an embrace of the simple life. As scholars J.W. Williamson in Hillbillyland and Dan Pierce in an exhibition for the Western North Carolina Historical Association entitled “Hillbilly Land: Myth and Reality in Appalachian Culture” have described, the image of the uneducated, white Appalachian rustic in the early 20th century was used by home missionaries, proponents of the Arts and Crafts movement, and even the federal government to help promote their business by using this particular “simple life” Southern stereotype.
Even so, the neon caricatures remain compelling to the passersby who may be both surprised and confounded by Asheville’s answer to the Las Vegas strip of the 1950s. Folks of an older generation may recall reinterpretations of Appalachian culture by way of Li’l Abner or the 1960s television show “The Beverly Hillbillies,” but the cliches of barefoot figures with guns, jugs of moonshine, corn cob pipes, and tattered clothing are curious beacons for those wanting a selfie with something both unexpected and distinctive “of the region.”
The Mountaineer Inn was purchased by Greek émigré Chris Moutos in 1964 and was under his ownership until his death earlier this year. One of Moutos’ sons, John, says that the sign — weathering decades of relocation and repairs — has required a great deal of specialized attention to keep it in operating condition.
Today, with its stone veneer, log piers, and cartoon Appalachian hillbillies, the Mountaineer Inn remains one of the few more or less original survivors along a stretch of Tunnel Road. Neighboring lots were once populated by motels including the Florida Courts — offering a displaced modern Miami Beach appeal — and, by the mid-1950s, national chain Howard Johnson’s, which offered the promise of recognizable, consistent lodging right down to its ubiquitous orange roofs and cafe serving heaps of fried clam strips. Now an unbroken line of grocery stores, restaurants, strip malls, and gas stations flanks the road amongst other, newer buildings.
From the well-worn patina of the great sign or the rooms’ earth-colored decor in laminate and polyester, the inn wears its vintage appeal in a certain meta fashion by acknowledging its cartoon-character trappings as a plastic version of some tourists’ expectations of mountain life. If there was once a certain earnestness in the clever theming of a hotel or inn as rustic, the charm that endures here is less about evoking the romance of nature, but rather remains within the contrasts offered by an odd blend of electric neon, timber, and stone greeting new generations of visitors to a whimsically retro place or, more ephemerally, a moment of roadside gawking.
Where the Mountaineer and a few other surviving mid-20th-century motels across Asheville remain as testimony to generations of travelers, countless other lodgings were lost years ago. Some were razed to accommodate commercial change or urban renewal projects that often failed to do little more than displace people and buildings, while many others fell to that particular indifference to history or legacy that plagues more modest structures — especially those associated with disenfranchised members of society.
Although many motels sought to be the accessible and practical counterpoint to the exclusive resort hotel, early establishments often fell short of the democratic promise they held. Of the more than 40,000 motels and hotels in operation in the United States in 1940, few accommodated African Americans. The Negro Motorist Green Book of that year listed but one hotel and a single tourist home in Asheville and only 21 such lodgings in the state. By 1960, not a single motel or hotel had been added to the city’s roster, including the Grove Park Inn and the Mountaineer Inn, and such statistics were similar across the country. Mark Twain’s words from The Innocents Abroad, “travel is fatal to prejudice,” adopted for the cover of the 1949 Green Book, were of that promise, if only too slowly realized.
In the article “Rewinding Asheville’s Black History,” author Dan Kochakian reflects upon Southside’s Booker T. Washington Hotel, later the James-Keys Hotel, as the city’s sole hotel dedicated to African American customers and frequented by touring musicians including Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin. In 1972, after 42 years of operation, it was transferred to the Asheville Housing Authority and demolished as part of the East Riverside redevelopment project, which impacted 1,300 homes and businesses and displaced about 1,250 families, including half of Asheville’s African American residents.
Just south of the James-Keys Hotel, Rabbit’s Motel, a tourist court that welcomed everyone from lone travelers and families to Negro Baseball League players and musicians including Percy Sledge and The Supremes, narrowly avoided a similar fate. Fred “Rabbit” Simpson’s motel, established in 1947, was renowned throughout the region not only for its accommodations but for a cafe that served “pork chops the size of Bibles.” Where the James-Keys has been lost, the former Rabbit’s Motel is bearing witness to a new chapter in its story. In 2020, musicians Claude Coleman Jr. and Brett Spivey, both Asheville transplants, bought the property and are slowly revitalizing its spaces with a nod to its past.
During a recent stay at the Mountaineer some months ago, I took a few minutes to walk around the buildings just before leaving, noticing small details often forgotten in the hurry of travel: a tiny American flag jutting out from one of the piers, the clock in the form of a miniature log cabin, the poolside flowerpots filled with fresh blooms. As I checked out early, I saw two hikers discussing their plans for the day as they poked through the cups of yogurt and coffee offered on a nearby lobby table. My thoughts turned to what the recent death of Chris Moutos might mean for the future of the inn. The marks of decades of travelers were present; where some might see character, harsher critics would find evidence of the age of the nearly century-old property. Years earlier, in an interview, Moutos had talked of remodeling “with new furniture from Amish country.” If the Grove Park Inn had its Arts and Crafts furnishings, so too could the humble Mountaineer carry aspirations for bits of handcraft.
Buildings are ultimately shaped not only by the intentions of architects, designers, and owners but according to circumstance and the people who inhabit them every day. In changing and adapting, we can consider the remains of our history not as overly precious fantasies, but as moments that suggest a taste of the realities and dreams of their respective times. In considering the past and the future of the Mountaineer, John Moutos hopes the legacy of his father and the inn will remain “as a part of Asheville … as a flavor of Asheville.”
As I looked out at a vista of Asheville’s skyline set against the Blue Ridge Mountains from the terrace of the Grove Park Inn, I understood how both of these inns have become intertwined with the identity of the city and its region even beyond their physical extremes of one kind of mountain lodging to another and the casual familiarity of hotels and once ubiquitous motels. As The Motel in America notes, such places “have simultaneously fostered the search for security and the opposing quest for adventure.” Even today, they both still command attention for how they represent our desires to journey to something distinctive to each of us, acknowledging a fuller spectrum of our lives, whether familiar or exotic, urban or rural, luxurious or modest, simple or decidedly complex.
Kevin W. Tucker is the chief curator at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. His interests include early 20th century architecture and design, and he has organized numerous exhibitions in the field. He has written about early modernism in Vienna and the work of American Arts and Crafts luminary Gustav Stickley. He now divides his time between his home in Atlanta and renovating his own escape of a midcentury chalet in the mountains near Asheville.
GROWL is the photo duo of Justin Weaver and Chris McClure. Together they make photographs, portraits, product shots, adventure, and documentary narratives that make people smile and wonder.
