A young Fred Loring Seely
I'm not going to go in-depth about Fred Seely, but I would like to. He was such a complicated and, in my opinion, lovely man. I wrote about him in my second e-book, discussing his decade-long tenure in Atlanta, where he must have run into my grandfather, Albert Nunnally Barnett, at the Georgian Terrace Hotel, where he was assistant manager.
Their relationship is ultimately what brought the Barnett family to Asheville in 1923. More importantly, Seely is likely the reason my maternal grandparents married in the first place;. Albert was working behind the desk at the Grove Park Inn when Marcellus Hallman and her siblings came to see the Grove Park Inn the year it opened in 1913 and Albert -- who had already met one of her brothers in Atlanta -- gave them the grand tour. He returned to Atlanta after that season, which is where he met up with Marcellus a second time shortly before their marriage in 1920.
In 1897, Grove met Seely when the former went to Detroit to consult with the Parke, Davis pharmaceutical company. Grove had invented a medication to prevent malaria, but it tasted bad and he wanted to see if he could make it into tablet form so that it would appeal to children. Parke, Davis assigned employee Seely to the task, and the two men hit it off. In the end, instead of signing a contract with Parke-Davis, Grove stole the multi-talented Seely away from them and put him in charge of a satellite Paris Medicine Company he had started in Asheville.
Seely, age 26, met the Grove family in St. Louis and shortly thereafter asked for the hand of Evelyn Grove, age 20; they married very quickly -- some sources say within two days -- without knowing each other well. Grove, while he admired Seely immensely, worried that the marriage took place too rapidly. Evelyn was the child of his first wife who died when Evelyn was seven years old. At least one other daughter, and possibly two, also died very young, and so for a number of years Edwin was Evelyn's entire world, acting as both a mother and father to her. They were very closely attached to each other.
Early on, Seely invented a machine to produce the malaria medication in tablet form. He also worked at the Paris Medicine Company in St. Louis, where he streamlined production and tried to modernize the company. This caused much friction between Grove and Seely. They were both extremely driven men, workaholics devoted to their work, but that's where the similarities stopped. Grove approached things in a willy-nilly way, while Seely was very methodical and systematic -- almost OCD-like. The Paris Medicine Company employees were not happy with Seely, which created an awkward situation for Grove. As a temporary fix, he sent Fred and Evelyn on a much belated honeymoon around the world, and in particular to Java, where Fred negotiated supplies for some of the medicines produced by the PMC.
Grove's second wife, Gertrude, was very jealous of her step-daughter Evelyn, because she saw how much Grove loved her. On the other hand, Grove and Gertie's only surviving child, Edwin Jr., was a real pill, and Grove didn't know quite how to deal with him. Edwin Jr., who was thirteen years younger than Evelyn, was not doing well in high school, but his father wanted him to get an Ivy League education. Shortly after they returned from their honeymoon, Mr. and Mrs. Seely and two of their children spent part of a year in Princeton, New Jersey -- their third child was actually born there. Nobody in St. Louis or Asheville could figure out why they were there, but it seems that Grove had put Seely in charge of seeing that Edwin Jr. had a successful time at Princeton. Seely tried to tutor Edwin himself, but when that didn't go well, he hired a tutor for him. Edwin flunked out of school anyway.
After that fiasco, the Seelys moved to Atlanta, where they enrolled Edwin Jr. at Georgia Tech; that also turned out to be a mistake, and Grove Jr. soon returned to St. Louis and Asheville. Grove bankrolled Seely in the production of a new newspaper in Atlanta called the Atlanta Georgian. Seely was the editor and took to muckracking several issues affecting Atlanta, which I wrote about previously. He particularly loathed the practice of releasing black prisoners to provide free or cheap slave labor to private companies. Even though he was successful in ending that practice, his left-leaning politics put him out of synch with the powers that be in Atlanta, and he could never make the newspaper very profitable in competition with the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution.
In 1912, Seely was thrashing around for something else to do to channel his great drive to succeed in something and to support his family. He heard that Grove was thinking about building a hotel in Asheville, and wanted to become a part of that. He sold his newspaper to William Randolph Hearst for $200,000. Most of that money went to pay for the building of the Grove Park Inn.
Seely poured himself into this new venture, which I've already discussed, and so I won't go into it in much detail here, but will give some highlights. Seely designed the hotel, and brought in an architect and an engineer from Atlanta to work with the builders. He oversaw almost every detail -- including all the furniture, lighting, rugs, etc. -- and managed to build the Inn in a year, even though Grove kept telling him not to jeopardize his health by working so hard. Seely wrote this in a letter to his father-in-law in 1914, the year after the Grove Park Inn was built:
If I should leave Asheville, it would be with no little regret. It is the most wonderful place to live, and I am sure I would find my way back here in my old age, if I am blessed with one. The landscaping is now finished, and the place is more beautiful than any I have ever seen. Of course, you must grant me the privilege of feeling this way, for it seems like a child to me.
Seely loved the Inn so much that he couldn't stay away from it, which Mr. Grove didn't seem to understand. However, Grove didn't want Seely to work for his pharmaceutical company, and so he agreed to lease the Grove Park Inn to Seely and let Seely run the Inn. Seely and Grove negotiated the price of the lease from time to time, and every year Seely wrote a check for the agreed upon percentage of the profits. Grove insisted that Seely make out the check to Evelyn -- as he was paying Edwin Jr. to work for the PMC, and wanted to even out the money between his two children. Seely did not like this arrangement, for he wanted to be able to earn a living in his own right, and not depend so completely on his wife financially. But Grove was worried that the marriage might not last because they had married so hastily.
Seely's Castle
I would add that Grove gave Seely many acres worth of property higher up on Sunset Mountain, above the Grove Park Inn. That's where Seely built what was known as Seely's Castle in or near Overlook Park (where Clarence Worrall held his art classes) in Asheville; it was also known as Overlook Castle, and later was used by Asheville-Biltmore College, which subsequently moved to its own site as the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Fred and Evelyn had five children, two girls and three boys.
Adding to the estrangement of the two men, Seely was horrified when Grove bought the Manor Inn, formerly owned by the Raoul family. Grove also tore down the existing Battery Park Hotel in downtown Asheville and rebuilt it as a skyscraper. Seely felt that Grove was trying to compete with the Grove Park Inn even though Grove was convinced that these hotels would appeal to a different clientele and therefore would not go head to head against the Grove Park Inn.
In 1925, Seely heard through the grapevine that his father-in-law had changed his will. According to Seely, Grove had signed a will in front of his son-in-law in 1900 that included a provision for Seely to inherit either a controlling share of the Paris Medicine Company or a controlling share of Grove's real estate holdings -- it was to be Seely's choice.
Seely filed a lawsuit against Grove for breach of promise, which seemed to be a theme in the Grove/Seely family. He wanted to get this sorted out before Grove died, but unfortunately Grove passed away in January of 1927, before the trial could get underway. Later that year, however, the trial began, and Gertrude and Edwin Jr. attended every day. giving Seely lots of dirty looks. Without getting in to all the legalese, the upshot was that Seely was not a beneficiary in that will, nor had he ever been a beneficiary, and the lawsuit was thrown out. It was said that Evelyn didn't speak to Fred for a year after he filed his lawsuit. The marriage lasted, however, even though Fred would never again have anything to do with Gertie and Edwin Jr.
Seely thus lost his lease on the Grove Park Inn, and it crushed him. Grove had insisted in his will that none of his businesses and hotels be sold, and that their combined income be divided three ways, among his wife and his two children. However, Gertrude and Edwin Jr. met with lawyers who arranged that Gertrude take advantage of an obscure law that gave her her money outright. She died the following year, and this legal maneuver cheated Evelyn out of several million dollars. That meant that much of the estate had to be liquidated, which resulted in the Grove Park Inn being sold to a Baltimore-based brokerage firm. The new owners were highly leveraged in this purchase, and when the Depression hit, they defaulted on the mortgage, but were subsequently able to refinance the hotel. Quoting from Bruce E. Johnson in Tales of the Grove Park Inn:
Albert Nunnally Barnett
Later that year [1932], a group of the original stockholders reorganized the ownership of the hotel, hiring Albert N. Barnett as the Inn's general manager.
Albert Barnett, though seldom recognized for his efforts, guided the Grove Park Inn through some of its most challenging times. Born in Ripley, Mississippi, as a young man he began working as a clerk in various hotels, rising up through the ranks and gaining valuable experience in Detroit and Atlanta. In 1923, he came to Asheville and served as Fred Seely's assistant, overseeing the operation of the hotel during Seely's extended travels. He remained with the Grove Park Inn after its sale by the Grove family in 1928 and was promoted to general manager in 1932, a position he held until leaving in 1940.
Biltmore Industries Homespun Museum
Seely had purchased Biltmore Industries from Edith Vanderbilt in 1917, and had established with his own money a building for the production of mountain crafts on the grounds of the Grove Park Inn. This gave him a reason to come onto the grounds. But there was also a gift shop and news stand in the Inn's lobby, which sold some of the Biltmore crafts as well as third-party items. Seely leased the news stand/gift shop from the new Maryland owners, and thus had a legitimate reason to visit the Inn regularly. While Albert was manager, Seely could keep his toe into things. Over the years he invited numerous famous guests -- including separate visits by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt -- to come to the Inn and/or to come to his home, which gave the Inn lots of free publicity.
The Grove estate was so complicated that it took many years to wend its way through multiple court processes. In 1940 -- 23 years after Grove's death -- the Battery Park Hotel was somehow awarded to Evelyn Seely. Fred was thrilled to have another hotel to throw his heart and soul into. He asked Albert Barnett to leave the Grove Park Inn and manage the Battery Park Hotel, and the rest is history! Unfortunately, Seely died in 1942 at the age of 70, just as he was putting all of his finishing touches on the hotel.
Next I will talk about Seely's early life, his influence on Asheville, and his descendants.
[Bruce E. Johnson has made a career out of the Grove Park Inn. He has published many books about the Inn, including his best known "Built for the Ages: A History of the Grove Park Inn." Back in the day, he interviewed my mother, Adelene Barnett Watts, and my grandmother, Marcellus Hallman Barnett. In 2013, on the centennial of the opening of the Inn, he published "Tales of the Grove Park Inn," which discusses, among other things, the personality clashes of Grove and Seely, and has informed some of what I have discussed in this blog.]
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