The Old Homestead Stables

You may have seen my September 2011 post about the Homestead Resort.  This great place is less than an hour away and we sometimes make our way to this old hotel nestled in Bath County, Virginia, heaven on earth.

The Hotel has quite an illustrious history, for another day, but it was served by the railroads back in the day when taking spa water was thought to cure a lot of ills.  The railroad is gone but the hotel survived.  The town is tiny, Hot Springs, and right in the middle sits an old delapadated stable.  This is the stable today.

  The original stables, below, were lost in a fire and replaced with the current stables in the early 1900's.

The stables were quite active at one time but now that horses are not needed for transportation, well, they became less important.  The Homestead also had a very fancy horse show at one time, I remember reading about it in the 1970's, The Bath County Show. 

 A newer facility was built in the 1980's and the "old stables" served as storage.  In 2012, Bath County declared the old stables a nuisance structure as the building became unsafe.  It was decided (unfortunately) that the structure should be demolished. 

This is where Black Dog Salvage comes in. 

They were brought in to salvage materials from the old stables.  The carriage elevator was still in tact:

They salvaged bead board from the tack room walls, stall doors, masive trusses (4 reclaimed trusses as a set for $12,000):  31.5 feet wide x 8 feet tall x 8" 8 3/4 thick.  

It is a sad day to see this historic structure being torn down but comforting in a way since some its parts will live on somewhere else.  You can see some of the stuff on Ebay here: http://stores.ebay.com/Black-Dog-Architectural-Salvage