REAL ESTATE Stu Rifkin remembers hitting the links at the Swannanoa Golf and Country Club, which straddled the rolling peaks of Afton Mountain, and thinking about what those 236 acres could become. Those memories came rushing back to him this past winter when the property was listed for sale. "It's an uncut gem," Rifkin told The Daily Progress.
"The views up there are spectacular." With golf falling in popularity across America and three generations of the course's owners dying within a few years, redeveloping a tract near two major highways and one national park seemed obvious. Adding to the chance of change, Rifkin thought, was another death-induced ownership shift.
Until he died last summer, James "Phil" Dulaney controlled the adjacent 600-acre tract featuring the original Swannanoa, a 1912-era Italian Renaissance revival mansion whose scale, materials and workmanship rival those of the famed "summer cottages" of Newport, Rhode Island. "You could turn the mansion into a wedding venue with rooms you can stay in," said Rifkin. But as he started mulling over the mansion's deferred maintenance backlog and the sheer size of the combined tracts spanning Augusta and Nelson counties, Rifkin, who works in real estate, said he realized that a redevelopment would require more capital than most developers could muster.
"It's a job for Paul Manning, or a consortium of Paul Manning, Hunter Craig, and Jaffray Woodriff," he said, listing of a who's who of Central Virginia real estate investors. As it turns out, the people now in charge of the mansion and its surrounding tracts, the officers and shareholders of the Dulaney family firm Skyline Swannanoa Inc., have similar thoughts.
"We are looking to find an appropriate development partner," company secretary William Hurd told The Daily Progress. Hurd may be best known as the lawyer who, two decades ago at the U.S.
Supreme Court, saved Virginia's statute banning cross-burning, designed to rid the commonwealth of the Ku Klux Klan. More recently, his advocacy at Virginia Supreme Court helped save Sweet Briar College after its board of directors announced plans to close the school due to "insurmountable financial challenges." And now Hurd, by virtue of his marriage, finds himself with a seat at one of Virginia's most storied tables and the chance to save a moldering mansion.
Hurd is the husband of Reta Dulaney, one of two sisters to Phil Dulaney, who unexpectedly took control of Skyline Swannanoa in 1970 when his father suddenly died while he was still in college. His father's death put him in charge of the area's largest petroleum firm, Charlottesville Oil, as well as much of Afton Mountain. Until his own death last year at the age of 72 from complications from diabetes and heart disease, Dulaney was locked in constant battle with arsonists, looters, regulators and, at times, his own best interests on the mountaintop.
He was accused of letting his properties crumble. 'Baghdad on Afton' The long-closed Howard Johnson's restaurant facing U.S.
250 in Afton has seen better days. Its trademark orange roof peeks through a chaos of vines amid a clutch of crumbling roadside commerce that once included a Holiday Inn atop the mountain above. "It looks like a dump," Maryland-based hiker Allison Kirsch told The Daily Progress.
"Are they just waiting for it to fall down before they build something?" Kirsch had just finished a 60-mile circuit on the Appalachian Trail when she purchased some popcorn from a vendor that recently moved into a food truck, since its former location, a brick-walled gas station a few feet away, now has a roof that invites rainwater inside. These former roadside hospitality structures have become so inhospitable looking that an observer once called the place "Baghdad on Afton." Kirsch expressed gratitude that she was able to obtain several days of free parking on the cracked swath of asphalt, but she wondered if this is the best use of such prime property.
"I'm sure," she said, "somebody could make something out of this." Indeed, Skyline Swannanoa seems eager to round up sufficient cash and partnership to repair what Hurd calls the "lower mountain," the 15 acres in the heart of Rockfish Gap, the place where the peaks dip and provide the junction between the Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway. "We are in the process of selling some but not all of the Charlottesville Oil properties in the city and county," Hurd said.
"This is part of the larger plan to focus attention on developing the lower mountain and restoring Swannanoa." Property records show that Charlottesville Oil's real estate arm owns 31 acres in Albemarle County and 13 acres in Charlottesville, tracts with a combined assessed value topping $18 million. "For sale" signs have recently been visible at least two retail locations on Ivy Road, the former Charlottesville Oil headquarters site across from the Boar's Head Resort and the long-closed Toddsbury of Ivy convenience store in Ivy.
Taxes on such fully depreciated properties could consume plenty of proceeds, but Hurd said Skyline Swannanoa is reaching out to planners and investors. "We want to be in this for the long haul," he said. Hurd said the chief technical problem facing the lower mountain is the need to extend water and sewer.
The large, rusty water tank visible from Interstate 64 sufficed for decades, he said, but then the well that fed it dried up. The effort to fix the lower mountain made headlines about three months ago when Augusta County officials revealed that they were seeking a $100,000 federal grant to help plan the property's future. Earlier, officials announced that Augusta County would receive $50,000 in Virginia Brownfields Assistance Funds to explore the freshwater supply and wastewater removal problems.
A stately home in a poor state Phil Dulaney's widow, Sandi, will turn 77 soon. A librarian by profession, she spent several decades in medical and science libraries at the University of Virginia. But when her husband's illnesses intensified in the years leading up to his July 2023 death, she took the reins of Swannanoa and now seems to relish her role as chatelaine.
On a recent Sunday, the mansion was abuzz with peals of laughter and anticipation as storybook characters, mostly princesses, highlighted a public event called "Character Creations" that welcomed scores of little girls. "I think it's beautiful," said Charlottesville mother Lisa Hudnall, who was visiting with her 4-year-old daughter and her daughter's cousin. "They've done a really great job keeping it nice and as original as possible.
" A stroll through Swannanoa is a stroll back in time. Like a Venetian palace, it offers a marble exterior entered through oversize bronze doors cloaked in reliefs of cherubs. The 52-room mansion is virtually unaltered since its 1912 construction by the Richmond-based firm of Noland & Baskervill.
"The Dooleys sent them to Italy to study architecture," said Sandi Dulaney as she walked visitors past a stairway landing where a monumental stained glass window by Louis Comfort Tiffany depicts the estate's first resident, Sallie Dooley, wife of Richmond industrialist James Dooley. "He built this for his wife to get away from the summer in Richmond," Dulaney told her audience. While a virtually unaltered mansion means few modern intrusions, it also means peeling wallpaper, cracked plaster and mechanical systems largely unchanged since its completion 112 years go.
She showed visitors the bedroom where she and her late husband lived for a while when he stabilized the mansion with a new roof and repairs to the Georgia marble cladding. "We were here a couple of winters, and it's not a cozy place, believe me," she said, noting one time in particular. "It snowed 2 feet, and the water froze, which meant the heat didn't work.
" After the Dooleys died, the mansion became the centerpiece of a planned resort. While the 1929 stock market crash and ensuing Great Depression put an end to that scheme, it lives on in the subdivision of part of the tract into dozens of lots, a few of which have sprouted houses with various owners. Hurd said he doesn't envision the multiplicity of owners dissuading the preservation of the historic core, which includes a water tank hidden in an Italianate campanile, trellised gardens and an unusually versatile carriage house which once devoted one side to horses and the other to then-new "horseless carriages" — that is cars.
Aerial photographs show the roof of that building open to the elements. Pete's place Just south of Swannanoa was the passion project of a Charlottesville native who went off to World War II to land at Normandy, command a tank and come back with a trove of medals. Randolph "Pete" Lang Sr.
parlayed his love of golf and an interest in entrepreneurship into the 1955 purchase of an overgrown farm along Howardsville Turnpike, and the Swannanoa Golf and Country Club was born. Despite the name, it was open to the public. And despite the expansive views of both the Shenandoah and Rockfish valleys, a round of golf at what many called "Pete's place" cost between $12 and $37 last year.
By contrast, the public price for 18 holes at Boar's Head ranges from $90 to $175. Although he would eventually cede control of the enterprise to his son, even into his 90s, Lang was a constant presence on the course. But then, six years after his 2017 death at the age of 95, the unthinkable happened.
Over the course of three weeks in the spring of 2023, both his 69-year-old son, Randolph "Bucky" Lang Jr,. and his 51-year-old grandson, Matthew Lewis Lang, were dead. The golf course property was listed for sale at $3.
5 million. "It has great potential for residential development, vineyards, etc.," reads the offering from listing agent Tim Michel.
In June, the property was marked as "under contract," and the following month, despite no change to the Augusta County land records, as "sold." While Michel declined to divulge the buyer's name or identity to The Daily Progress, a look across the street offers clues. There, the 16 lots of the Elk Rock Meadow subdivision were carved out of an orchard and now hold an array of houses typically valued by the Nelson County assessor at over $1.
5 million each. One broker who showed the golf course property claims there's a restriction that would prevent the site from sprouting houses like the subdivision across the street, and that's OK with Rifkin. "It ought to be a resort," said Rifkin.
"It ought to have pools, and the golf course ought to be revitalized." Even if the golf course shrank to nine holes, he added. "People are traveling," said Rifkin.
"They're still spending money on experiences." The sound of wedding bells Chris Graham is a Shenandoah Valley journalist who married another journalist, Crystal Graham, in 2000 at the hotel atop Afton Mountain. "When Crystal and I would drive over the mountain, we always had this game we'd play where we'd say, 'How long has it been since we've been married?'" he told The Daily Progress.
"Lately, we don't want to play that game, because it doesn't look so good." What opened in 1968 as a Holiday Inn with the clean lines and sleek styling that characterized the chain is now a literal dump. When the Grahams got married, it was October, and their guests were treated to turning leaves and expansive views through floor-to-ceiling windows.
Today's passersby can see upturned chairs through grime-encrusted windows and reams of old hotel paperwork scattered on the floor alongside fallen plaster and rodent droppings. "It's depressing that it's fallen into such disrepair," Chris Graham said. "To see it crumbling is not pleasing.
" Another person saddened by the state of the property is Gilie Garth, whose parents honeymooned at the Holiday Inn. "They were broke," she told The Daily Progress. Later, her parents would take her and her pals up Afton Mountain when there was a steakhouse operating in the motel.
"My dad thought, 'Why would anybody go to the Aberdeen Barn on Holiday Drive when you could go to the Angus Barn with those spectacular views?'" The ice skating rink that sat below the motel swimming pool was another draw. "We would go outside to ice skate while waiting for our prime rib to pop off," said Garth. "It was a really simple, idyllic moment.
I loved that place." "Personally," she continued, "I'd prefer them not to put some dumb winery up there. I can't really picture what it should be — just something to preserve the beauty of that place.
" For Hurd, preserving Swannanoa and remaking the lower mountain are top priorities. "We're confident," he said, "that in a few years time it will look entirely different." Hawes Spencer (434) 960-9343 hspencer@dailyprogress.
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