During the early 1830’s, Samuel W. Lackland gained control of most of the Shannondale Springs property. On September 1, 1837, he and his wife sold their 8/9ths interest in the 66 ½ acre Shannondale Springs tract and the entire 121-acre tract adjoining it to a new group of investors. The group included Andrew Kennedy, Joseph T. Daugherty, Robert T. Brown, George W. Hammond, William Yates, John S. Gallaher, William Crow, John B.H. Fulton, and Charles G. Stewart.29 This group, plus James L. Ranson, comprised the ownership of the Shannondale Springs Company when it was incorporated in March 1838 by the Virginia General Assembly. The men had their share of power, influence, and financing. To finance the purchase of the property from Lackland, each member of the group placed his 40 shares in the company in trust to Richard Parker. A loan of $5,000 for improvements was obtained from the Charlestown branch of the Valley Bank, whose president was their long-standing associate, Thomas Griggs, Jr. 30

The birth of the Shannondale Springs Corporation in 1838 takes on additional significance when we recognize that the incorporators were members of Virginia’s Whig party who had been working for more than a decade to have the legislature fund internal improvements projects such as railroads, highways, and canals. One of the former owners, Thomas Griggs, Jr., had served in the House of Delegates in 1835.31 John S. Gallaher, in particular, was an important force in the success of the resort. Gallaher had fought for internal improvements from his seat in the Virginia House of Delegates and from his position as editor or investor in several Whig newspapers in Virginia. As the fame of Shannondale Springs grew during the next 20 years, it would become more than a resort for the wealthy. It would become a Whig enclave with strong ties to Baltimore, Washington, and Richmond.

The hotel, under its new ownership, reopened on June 10, 1838. Isaac. N. Carter was hired as proprietor of the hotel, and a writer noted that the “company are erecting bath houses where persons can be provided with warm or cold baths, for which purpose they can use either the mineral waters, or the river water, as may be preferred.” Gallaher lost no time in promoting the virtues of his new investment. In 1838, his Charlestown newspaper, the Free Press, published a prospectus entitled Shannondale: the Quality and Character of the Waters and Their Effects upon Various Diseases.32

Gallaher’s prospectus includes the following description of the resort by a Professor Hall of Maryland:

How can invalids of the Monument City, get to these Springs? Nothing in the world is easier. Step into an elegant car on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, early in the morning, and you will be transported to Harpers-Ferry before 2 o’clock, 82 miles. Here you will have leisure to breathe and to take a bird’s-eye view of those beauties and sublimities of nature, so graphically described by the pen of the philosophic Jefferson. By this time, you will be summoned into the dining-room, where you will find as sumptuous a repast, and as good attendance, as you will meet with at Barnum’s or at Page’s. After dinner, you get into the cars of the Winchester and Potomac Railroad Company, and in three quarters of an hour will reach Charlestown, ten miles. Here, a good Stage will be found in waiting, with a most obliging and careful driver. In this vehicle you proceed to the Ferry, by which you cross the Shenandoah, and are bro’t on to the broadest part of the horse-shoe. Moving along the margin of the winding river, your ears are now greeted, for the first time, by its never ceasing murmurs, occasioned by the passage of the flood over the numberless rocks which oppose its progress. A few yards from the path, you see the health-giving fountain, whose waters incessantly bubble up from the waters beneath, and are surrounded by a circular block of sandstone. In three minutes more you alight at your lodgings. The whole journey is performed in a single day, and with very little fatigue.

As you descend towards the Ferry, you see on the Northern side of the hill, and near its base, a long two-story brick edifice, made snow white by lime, and back of it, farther up the hill, a dozen or more small dwellings, mostly of wood, and now in good repair. Back of these, and withdrawn a few rods from them, stand two one-story brick lodgments, separated each into four small convenient apartments. These are the best private rooms belonging to the concern, and are preferred by those who love 9 and seek retirement. The upper stories of the long edifice are divided into twenty-five lodging rooms. The dining room, in the first story, is 80 feet long and 30 wide. In this spacious apartment, the light-footed nymphs and joy-seeking swains often mingle in the giddy dance. The buildings are neatly finished. Comfort is consulted.

A visitor to the hotel in 1848 provided further details of the landscape. Describing the panoramic view from the hill in back of the hotel, he noted, “To the right, the waving and sloping ground is devoted to agricultural purposes, and exhibits an appearance of great fertility and productiveness. To the left of the main building [are] gravelled walks, bordered by trees...”34 (See Figure 5 for a contemporary view.)

Figure 5. Illustration of Shannondale Springs from Henry Howe's Historical Collections of Virginia, 1845.

Outlining the regimen at the Springs, Professor Hall asserted that “no mineral water of this country, possessing the same constituent parts, is a more active purgative, when freely taken, than the Shannondale; being, in general, equal in power to most of the neutral salts; or, on the contrary, more bland in its operation, when used with moderation; acting as gently as the mildest aperient, without giving rise to griping or flatulence, or 10 that feeling of debility so often occasioned by ordinary cathartics.” He observed that “morning is considered the most suitable — drinking it at the springs if practicable.... It may also be taken at night by those who are desirous to secure its full effect on the bowels.” As to other treatments,

... the warm bath will serve as a very important auxiliary to the water.... It is generally believed to be a much safer remedy than the cold bath, and more particularly applicable to persons of weak and irritable constitutions, who could not bear the shock produced by cold bathing, in consequence of their not possessing sufficient vigour of circulation to bring about the proper re-action.... The necessary change of scene that takes place in visiting watering places, the exercise of the body, the abstraction of the mind from the cares attendant on business, the interruption of a uniform train of thought and attention, all certainly co-operate with the beneficial effects of the waters.35

George Watterson, visiting the Springs a decade later, provides further detail on the process of taking the waters:

The principal Spring is surrounded by magnificent elms and other ornamental trees, under the shade of which are placed seats for the accommodation of those who wish to drink its water. An old colored woman seated near the Spring, from morning to night, employs herself in dipping up the water for visitors, and whose compensation is regulated by the charity of those who avail themselves of her voluntary aid. She may be the genius of the fountain, but she is far from being its nymph...36

But what if a guest demanded amusement rather than treatment?

Are you a pedestrian? You have an agreeable promenade of a mile on the banks of a stream about as wide, but not so deep, as the Thames at London, but far more beautiful. Are you an angler? The home of the perch, the sucker and the eel, is the Shenandoah; — a boat and fishing apparatus are prepared, and a colored man ever ready to attend you. Are you fond of hunting? Four or five fowling pieces are now standing in one of the rooms for your use. Do you like excursions on the water? A skiff is at hand — you can go down the river in it to Harpers-Ferry in the evening, and row back in the morning. Are you a mineralogist or geologist? Gratifying ambulations may be made for examining the structure of rocks, and the collecting of specimens. “I have not strength,” you may say, “to perform these excursions.” Then you can sit in your apartments, and amuse yourself in looking at the long rafts of lumber which are continually passing, and boats freighted with flour, some destined to the city of power, but more for the city of shot towers, and steamboats, and fine hotels. Backgammon, checker and puzzle boards, are at your call. Do you wish for the society of well educated gentlemen and ladies? No where in this country, or perhaps in the world, do you meet with better informed or more polished people, than very many of those who reside within the compass of six miles around Shannondale.37

Another visitor to the resort in the summer of 1838 observed that, for visitors wishing to bathe in the river, “A convenient floating house has been erected for gentlemen, from which the bather descends by a flight of steps into the water, where he finds, besides an agreeable temperature of the water, a firm sandy bottom, and of different depths to accommodate his wishes. — The proprietors are about to erect a similar establishment for ladies, which will be hailed by them with great satisfaction.”38

Under Gallaher’s direction, the Virginia Free Press became an important vehicle for advertising the virtues of Shannondale Springs. During the next 20 years, its pages contained numerous testimonials to the curative powers of its waters and descriptions of the events attended by local society and visiting dignitaries.

Gallaher’s articles and the property transactions of the period also reveal that the owners of Shannondale Springs were developing the local tourist industry by acquiring property near the intersection of highways and the newly built railroads and by forming business alliances with hotel owners in Charles Town and Harpers Ferry. Shortly after the Shannondale Springs Hotel opened under the management of I. N. Carter, a recent guest wrote to the Free Press noting,

I was a sojourner for a few days at Carter’s hospitable hotel [Charles Town], when I was invited to take a jaunt for the Springs. In an hour from my setting off in a fine stage, driven by a careful driver, passing in that time through a beautiful and cultivated country — through fine wheat fields bending to the breeze, the hopes of the farmer — thro’ noble primeval forests that overshadowed the road, we arrived at the River which sweeps around this most beautiful spot, and early as the season is, we found our same host, Carter, in proper person, to administer to our wants. He tendered to us all manner of tempting beverages, besides the valuable water of the fountain; but it is that and not of his wines that I would speak. Attractive as all the comforts and luxuries of a well kept house may be, it is the water — that is the charm of Shannondale. 39

Thus Isaac Carter, owner of the Carter Hotel in Charles Town, was actively recruiting guests for the Shannondale Springs hotel he managed.

Other persons associated with the Springs were also busy forging alliances. In August 1839, Henry Berry sold the Shannondale Springs Corporation two parcels of land near the intersection of the Charlestown to Martinsburg road (now Route 9) and the Winchester and Potomac Railroad (present day Kerneysville, West Virginia). Berry, who had served in the Virginia House of Delegates with Thomas Griggs, Jr., and John S. Gallaher, had acquired the property in 1834, before the railroad had reached Harpers Ferry. By November 1841, T. A. Milton and Company, former investors in the Shannondale Springs property, had leased the U.S. Hotel at Harpers Ferry. One of the company had been the hotel keeper at Shannondale Springs for several years. The new proprietor of the U.S. Hotel was Capt. Joseph F. Abell, who was in charge of this establishment in 1845. A Free Press article for 1847 identifies Capt. John J. Abell as the proprietor of the Shannondale Springs Hotel and Capt. M. Thompson as bartender at both establishments. The writer for the Free Press notes that guests arriving at Harpers Ferry on the B & O Railroad will probably want to enjoy a delicious meal at the local hotel, then board a Winchester & Potomac train for Charles Town, where they can take a carriage to the Springs.40 These alliances suggest that businessmen in Jefferson County were aggressively building local tourism as an industry.