Massanetta Springs Historic District

About this property

The Massanetta Springs Historic District is a retreat in Rockingham County, Virginia, administered by the Presbyterian Synod of the Mid-Atlantic, and chiefly associated with the Massanetta Springs Summer Bible Conference Encampment. The district includes the Hotel (1910), Hudson Auditorium (1922) and Camp Massanetta (1955–56). A Methodist camp existed at the site, originally known as Taylor's Springs, from 1816. The first settler in the area was James Taylor, who built a house there after 1730. About 1816 Jonathan and William Taylor leased the site to the Rockingham Circuit of the Methodist Episcopal Church for use as a camp meeting ground. The annual meetings were extremely popular, and the springs were reported as having healing properties. The springs came under the ownership of Evan Henton in the late 1840s, who operated a modest spa at the site. A partnership established in the 1870s attempted to rename the property the "Ague and Healing Springs", and Dr. Burke Chrisman built a house there in 1885 and a hotel that may have survived until 1994. By 1893 the area was becoming known as Massanetta Springs, a portmanteau of the common local place name Massanutten and Chrisman's wife's name, Henrietta. Chrisman marketed water from the springs, artificially carbonated and sold nationwide as "Massanetta Spring Water" and "Massanetta Water". After the death of Dr. Chrisman in 1909, the property was sold to banker James Robert Lupton of Harrisonburg, Virginia. Lupton began to build a brick hotel at the springs. In 1912 he sold the property to the Massanetta Springs Company, but took back ownership in 1919. The same year Lupton and his wife sold the resort to Hampden-Sydney College in return for a lifetime annuity of $2,400. Hampden-Sydney College apparently planned to use the property as a Presbyterian boarding school, and retained the New York architectural firm of Visscher & Burley to draft a master plan. By 1920 the academy was losing appeal, and in 1923 the college transferred ownership to the synod. The synod operated the resort as a religious retreat once more and built a tabernacle, the open-air Hudson Auditorium. Conferences and attendance at Massanetta was ecumenical, with Methodist, Baptist, Brethren and Lutheran groups organizing conferences. In the 1930s, the idea of using the property for a school briefly resurfaced, but was abandoned. In 1931, the Massanetta Music School held festivals for church choirs, running through 1939. From 1925, a series of cottages was built near "The Grove," eventually comprising 41 privately owned cottages. These cottages are outside the historic district. In 1947, the Richardson Building, an army surplus structure, was built to provide additional guest accommodation; it was modernized and given a second floor in 1962, giving it the appearance of a motel, and resulting in its exclusion form the historic district.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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