Historians find lots to love in Virginia – four presidential homes, more than a hundred battlefields, countless cemeteries, monuments and historic buildings. This year, the National Register of Historic Places added another spot in the Commonwealth – a swimming pool. Sandy Hausman reports on why it was honored.
The Blue Ridge Swim Club, just west of Charlottesville, is surrounded by an old growth forest, accessible by a one-lane, unpaved road. The pool the length of a football field and was built more than a hundred years ago according to owner Todd Barnett.
“It was built by R. Warner Wood for a camp that he ran called Camp Blue Ridge for about ten years, between 1909 and 1919, and he built the pool as best I can tell in 1913, but it was an elaborate pool where they did canoeing, and they had a gigantic platform on the deep end for diving.”
After the camp closed, neighbors kept the place up, and Barnett says it’s still in great shape, fed by a natural spring which flows in one end and out the other. Some say it was built with the help of an engineer who had worked on the Panama Canal. Barnett couldn’t find proof of that, but it wouldn’t surprise him.
“Because it’s been a remarkably solid, long-standing pool, and the water comes into it and goes out of it very effectively.”
It’s now open to members and used by the Field School’s Day Camp, but Mark Wagner, at the Department of Historic Resources, was not surprise by the request.
“He’s from Richmond, but he had been here at one point, and he immediately said this wouldn’t be unlike doing a drive-in movie theater, and we just had one of those designated.”
Barnett thinks the Blue Ridge Swim Club is the third oldest pool in the nation at 102 years of age – behind a couple in Colorado. Historic designation might bring him some tax credits, should he choose to do more restoration of the property, but he says he went through the application process for the joy of posting a plaque identifying this as being on the National Register of Historic Places.