“The Blue Ridge mountains are full of campers,” the Waynesboro News announced in 1928. “They camp just anywhere they can get a cool breeze. Everyone who owns land in Sugar Hollow is very attentive, looking after the interests of the campers.”
By mid-19th century, long before there was any thought of a reservoir in Sugar Hollow, the vast wonders of those mountains and meadows had been discovered by “outsiders” as a place for good fishing and sweet repose. Charlottesville lawyer and congressman R.T.W. Duke Sr. was already making annual forays into these wilds of western Albemarle, and continued so, with his son and other close friends, into the late 1800s.
Years later, his son Duke Jr. fondly recalled details of those trips in his memoirs. He wrote, “One of the greatest pleasures of my life, and one which brought me into the delightful companionship with my dear Father, was trout fishing in Moorman’s River. We drove up in a spring wagon and the trip took five hours.”
The Dukes’ early-years destination was just beyond Goose Egg Rock at the home of Thomas (1803–1861) and Elizabeth Maupin (1805–1881) Harris and family, near the present-day mouth of the reservoir.
“We stayed with the Harrises,” wrote Duke Jr., “where a warm welcome awaited us. Our room opened on the porch and the river was not twenty steps from the house. As it tumbled over the stones with a most musical ripple, I realized to the full what Byron meant when he said, ‘Lulled by falling waters.’”
“Picnicking in Sugar Hollow has become the fashion in this and surrounding sections,” wrote the Augusta County Argus in late summer 1908. “Hardly a day passes that this far-famed spot is not invaded by wagon loads of merry people seeking fine and beautiful scenery. It is rumored that there is a pool of water there known as the Goose Egg Hole, that once you take a plunge in this crystal water you never lose your beauty.”
Well, now, we might wonder if traffic bumped up a notch after such a revelation of magical waters.
Revered news writer and columnist Beverly Smith (1898–1972), who lived at Ivy as a youngster, 1910-1914, fondly recalled those early days for the New York Herald Tribune. He wrote, “I was then at the age when everything looks at its best… In September the entire community got into farm wagons, dismissed crops from their minds, rode fourteen miles to Sugar Hollow, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and camped out for a week or ten days. They did their own cooking, shot squirrels, swam in Goose Egg Hole—and had the best time I ever saw a group of people have.”
In those glory days with groups camping out for a week or two at a time in Sugar Hollow, it was tradition to name one’s camp. Those names included Camp Bandanna, Camp Tullahome, Camp Chatterbore, Kamp Kant Ketch’em and numerous others.
It was the Do-Drop-In campers who made their presence known there in 1910. “A happy-go-lucky, do-as-you-please camping party made the hills surrounding Sugar Hollow reverberate with song and laughter during the past week,” chronicled Richmond’s Times-Dispatch. “Various amusements, fishing, bathing, Kodaking, and mountain climbing, made the days pass only too swiftly. The nights were illumined with roaring camp fires, around which song, story, the merry dance, and, among the men, the peace-pipe, passed. At meal times only one whoop brought the hungry, clamoring crowd, where a game of ‘to the best grabber belong the spoils’, was indulged in.
“Two notable events marked the passing of the week. The first was a game of baseball between the members of Do-Drop-In camp and rival tenters at Goose Egg Rock. Mother Nature kindly provided spectators with a sloping hillside grandstand, upon which fair damsels reposed and cheered their respective sides to victory. Dr. Flannagan, of Charlottesville, umpired the game, and justly decided on the score, 10–0, in favor of the Do-Drop-In boys. Several star plays were made, though most of the players saw stars, as there was an average of a rock to every square inch of ground.”
In 1916, Sugar Hollow native William E. James (1865–1931) sold 25 acres, across the river from Goose Egg Rock, to Charlottesville law book publisher and bank president George R.B. Michie. There, Michie built a private, rustic camp on a hill above the point which, at that time, was the confluence of the South and North Forks of Moorman’s River.
A proposal was advanced by Charlottesville in 1921, to study the possibility of using the mountain waters of Moorman’s River to augment the city’s needs. In 1923, engineers for the City recommended an impounding reservoir at Michie’s Camp site, with a 14-mile gravity pipeline direct to the town’s water filter plant. Following the year-long project, in 1925, the Daily Progress noted, “Samples showed that the water now supplying Charlottesville is the clearest and purest in the city’s history.”
The old camp and property was purchased by the city in 1924 “to enlarge the watershed of the new water system.” Later, the Young Men’s Business Club and League of Women Voters proposed to use the former Michie Camp to establish a “municipal camp for the young people of the city as a place for recreation.”
That movement proved popular, and soon many groups were signing up for the opportunity to camp there. Subsequently, in addition to the City’s youth camps, Boy Scout groups were using the camp by the early 1930s; the 4-H Club’s first summer camp in Albemarle County took place there in 1935; and a District Boy Scouts Camporee with 150 attendees took place in 1941.
Throughout the years of adaptations to Moorman’s River in Sugar Hollow, from sometimes low-water roadbed, to raging tempest, to a small diversion dam in 1925 (present-day stilling basin), to construction in 1946-’47 of its imposing dam and impounding reservoir, the storied, magical Goose Egg Rock was witness to it all.
Follow Secrets of the Blue Ridge on Facebook! Phil James invites contact from those who would share recollections and old photographs of life along the Blue Ridge Mountains of Albemarle County. You may respond to him at phil@crozetgazette.com. Secrets of the Blue Ridge © 2003–2024 Phil James