By William “Skip” Deegans
In 1922, Greenbrier County lost one of its most historical landmarks when the Old White (shown in this undated photo) was razed and replaced by what became The Greenbrier Hotel. Reporting the destruction of the Old White, The West Virginia News wrote, “It was in the barroom of the Old White that the far-famed mint julep was first concocted, which was later exploited and credited to the goateed Kentucky ‘Colonels.’”
A contemporary mint julep is a cocktail of crushed or shaved ice, bourbon, sugar, water, and fresh mint. Bob Conte, the former historian at The Greenbrier, gives an account of the mint julep being served at the Old White as early as 1816. There is some thought the mint julep was created in Richmond or Norfolk when ice houses were first opened in the late 1700s. Vicksburg, Mississippi, boasts that drinking mint juleps began when boatmen on the Mississippi River added fresh mint growing along the river banks to their whiskey.
While we may never know when and where the first mint julep was imbibed, it may have had a role in preventing the Old White from experiencing the extinction that beset other summer resorts in the our area. Alarmed at the run down state of the Old White in the early 1900s, former West Virginia Governor William MacCorkle and some of his associates invited the owner of the C&O Railroad to dine at the hotel in a quest to talk him into buying it. The dinner was described as:
“A mint julep was served in long glasses with mint eight inches high. A dainty dish of terrapin just from the Chesapeake Bay, prepared with a dash of old sherry, served along with Madeira sixty years in the wood – verily, the sipping of ambrosia. Then came the piece de resistance – half a canvas-back duck, for each plate, cut by a cleaver directly in two, and served with heaping plates of hot Virginia corn dodgers (cornmeal cakes) and vegetables fresh from the Company’s gardens, while the whole was crowned with golden Champagne.”
Evidently, the ploy worked as the railroad bought the resort.
Photo courtesy of the West Virginia Regional History Center.
Sources: The West Virginia News, The Greenbrier Culinary Community: History Of The Mint Julep, The Atlantic, Wine Enthusiastic Magazine, The Daily Beast, www.Greenbrier.com
