Swannanoa Palace: Two Million Dollars of Marble at the Top of the World

Just above the gap where Skyline Drive meets the Blue Ridge Parkway, mostly hidden by trees, sits one of the most improbable buildings in Virginia. Swannanoa Palace is a twenty-three-thousand-square-foot Italian Renaissance villa built of Georgia marble, perched on Afton Mountain at the crest of the Blue Ridge, overlooking both the Shenandoah and Rockfish valleys at once.

It was built by Major James H. Dooley, a Richmond railroad lawyer and financier who had accumulated a fortune managing real estate and rail interests in the post-Civil War boom. Dooley and his wife Sally May wanted a summer retreat, and he bought a thousand-acre tract on the mountain in the early nineteen hundreds. Construction began in nineteen oh four. He hired more than three hundred artisans, Italian stonecutters, fresco painters, decorative plaster craftsmen, and the work took eight years. The final cost was two million dollars, which translates to more than forty-six million in today's money.

The house was modeled on buildings from the Villa Medici and the Villa Borghese in Rome. Inside: Italian marble floors and columns, ornate plasterwork ceilings, pastel frescoes, and inlaid wood paneling. Swannanoa had its own power plant, the first house in Nelson County to have electricity, along with indoor plumbing and central heating, technologies that most of its mountain neighbors would not see for decades.

Dooley died in nineteen twenty-two, Sally May in nineteen twenty-five. The palace passed through several owners, was used briefly as a country club, and later as a center for a metaphysical organization that opened it to public tours. For decades it sat in precarious condition, its marble staircase crumbling, its grounds gone wild.

Today Swannanoa is privately held and not regularly open to visitors. But it remains astonishing to contemplate from the parkway: a palazzo built for a Gilded Age millionaire at the exact pivot point between Virginia's two great valleys.