Motor On

Remember when Bryan Park had "homey feeling" tourist campsites?

Yea, me neither.

But I do remember a childhood trip to Maine where we took Route 1 the whole way (my Dad taught us the pleasures of back roads over the interstate young), staying at a roadside motel along the way.

That's what I was reminded of this morning when I went to see "No Vacancy: Remnants of Virginia's Roadside Culture," the new exhibit at the Library of Virginia.

The show focuses on that period of time when Americans broke away from trains and took to the highways and byways once Route 1 was fully paved in 1927.

Hardly surprising, one thing I learned was that it was the United daughters of the Confederacy who lobbied hard to get Route 1 named Jefferson Davis Highway.

From Florida to Maine, let's remember the Confederacy.

Checking out the old photograph of a couple camping in Bryant Park, I was struck by how civilized it all looked.

A table inside the tent held the man's tie (now off while he cooked dinner over an open fire) and a lantern. Outside the tent, another table had a cloth tablecloth, awaiting the evening meal.

Two girls beside me looking at the picture had a different take. "I wouldn't want to camp back in the '20s. Too many bugs!"

Many of the large-format photographs were of old tourist courts, also called motor courts, many of them in Chester, like Moore's Brick Cottages, built in 1929.

The sign out front said breakfast was 25 cents and regular meals 50 cents. Their brochure said each cottage had steam heat at all times in cold weather and was cool in the summer.

Back then, the preferred method of cooling was building the cottages under a grove of shady trees, a lovely way to be cooled.

But once I-95 opened, many businesses, especially motels, along Route 1 began withering, so there were also photographs of decaying motels, grown over with weeds or crumbling with age and disuse.

Display cases held old postcards from motels, each making their facility look like a vacation playground with happy tourists, brilliant blue pools and quaint buildings.

There was even a section on the genesis of "no-tell motels," which I found fascinating.

Seems that back in the '20s, tourist courts were required to collect registration information from guests. The purpose was to deter the kind of bad behavior that made FBI director Hoover call them "camps of crime" for what he presumed went on there.

Stuff like rape, white slavery, disease, murder and bribery.

Funny, when we stayed at a motor court on that long-ago trip, all I remember was cheeseburgers at the motel diner and a carnival across the street to entertain us afterwards.

I may have been awfully young, but it seemed like a slice of heaven just off the road to me.

Fortunately, the white slavers were nowhere to be seen.