Luckily, the Grove Park Inn was too expensive to tear down after World War II. The historic resort in the mountains of Asheville, N.C., is now one of the world's best spa hotels and included on the National Register of Historic Places.
St. Louis pharmaceutical company owner and millionaire Edwin Wiley Grove decided in 1912 to build the Grove Park Inn in Asheville because of the area's climate. It took 400 men one year to build it.
Ten presidents have stayed at the hotel: Calvin Coolidge, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. F. Scott Fitzgerald stayed at the hotel for two years to write while his wife was in an insane asylum in Asheville. The rooms in which he stayed, 441 and 443, are available for guests. One is furnished exactly as it was during his stay in the 1930s. Rooms in which famous people stayed are marked by plaques on the door saying who stayed there and when.
The Grove Park Inn joined the war effort during the 1940s.The Navy sent sailors there for rest and rehabilitation, and the Army sent soldiers there between assignments.
Travel & Leisure magazine named the Grove Park Inn spa the13th best in the world in 2008. The spa covers 40,000 square feet and cost $44 million.
It has 510 rooms in the main inn and two new wings. The main inn is furnished with original Arts and Crafts furniture with Roycroft drawer pulls. The hotel has the largest collection of Arts and Crafts furniture in the world. It also has two of the three Roycroft grandfather clocks ever produced.
