Encompassing over 100 acres, sitting on the clean and clear Cowpasture River with a double natural spring fed pond, and an amazing creek to explore, Nimrod is the ultimate getaway for anyone who likes to be outside and active. It also is perfect for the people who prefer to sit on their porch and read or paint all day. Nimrod is what you want it to be. Along with the Main Hall, there are many other buildings and cottages on the property, with every space having its own charm. Nimrod Hall is a place unlike any other. You arrive, put your suitcases in a room and immediately unwind. Nimrod has been around, in some fashion, since 1783, which is a long time. It is not fancy and is not for the guest seeking luxury accommodations but for the people who enjoy a rustic, charming, old Virginia lifestyle. However, with an 85% return rate, Nimrod Hall seems to be a place that hooks you to return again and again.
Nimrod Hall has been a summer resort since the 1880’s and in recent years has been full of guests through simple word of mouth advertising. Guests come once and just return year after year. It is like coming home. As a self sufficient running farm, in the early part of the 1900’s and well into the 1980’s, Nimrod guests enjoyed only foods grown at Nimrod, Meat from Nimrod animals and even the electricity was made through a dam located at the pond. After the great depression years that were hard on every American, it was a fact that something had to be done to help Nimrod remain and prosper. Frank Wood, the youngest of 13 children of owners Lewis and Emma Wood, stayed at Nimrod Hall and began a summer camp for young boys called Camp Nimrod. Immediately successful, young men were put onto trains all over the state and beyond to come and stay at Nimrod for 8 weeks. C&O railroad would stop in Millboro, they would be picked up and begin their adventures in what is remembered as some of the best years of as many young mens’ lives. A girls camp was created across the pasture in only 2 years time, to become Nimrod Hall Girls Camp. During that time, the Hall on the hill continued to offer stays for resort guests as well, with many guests being parents or friends of campers as well as the steady guests who returned summer after summer. Even astronauts children attended Camp Nimrod! Something that was very exciting in the 1970‘s when it happened. Some of the guests stayed in the same cottage every year for over 40 years which is where most names of the cottages originated.
As summer camps began to lose favor in the late 1980’s and with the death of Frank Wood, the camp finally closed because of a massive flooding of the river in 1985. The girls camp also closed. It was a sad day for many people to lose the camps. Nimrod Hall has never been closed but has opened summer after summer, year after year, to create a continuity that is felt strongly to generations of people.
Nimrod Hall itself is built on a large hill, so has never been flooded and continued on. In 1986 a small group of women in Richmond, Va., decided that Nimrod Hall seemed a logical place to go and make art. They approached Frankie Wood Apistolas and in a smart business move she agreed to let them come and create with little rules and a warm and gracious approach. How right those visionary women were. Artists require no fancy trappings and simply want to not feel bad if a spot of color got on the floor. It was perfect. And maybe what they didn’t know then that we do now is that Nimrod has a special way of making all of us more creative. Much like the camp saved Nimrod back 130 years ago, the artist camp has helped it remain vital since 1986. Up to 150 artists and writers per summer have made their home at the top of the hill at Nimrod Hall and delight in being a grown up going back to summer camp with only arts and crafts or creative writing as their main activity! More info on the artist/writer camps can be found at www.nimrodhallart.com.
The Wood family ran Nimrod Hall from 1906 until Laura And Will Loving took over this past September. For the past 40 years, Frankie Wood Apistolas and Jim Apistolas have been the owner/caretakers and brought Nimrod to a whole other generation.. In a series of fairly unusual kismet circumstances, Laura Loe Loving, head of the Artist Workshops since 1997, and her husband Will Loving, were in a position to consider taking over the day to day running of Nimrod Hall when time came for Frankie and Jimmy to retire. Laura and Will were married at Nimrod, went into labor with their first child at Nimrod and thought of Nimrod as a second home complete with family and good friends. With Laura at the helm of the art workshops, she has spent over a month at Nimrod since 1997, so is no stranger to what it means to so many people. Having run the artist workshops and having Frankie and Jim be very close friends, it was a logical transition. So here we are, excited to be able to offer Nimrod in yet another chapter of her history, to an entirely new generation.
For the first time in recent Nimrod history, we will be offering some open week long stays that run from Sunday afternoon until Friday morning, as well as Weekend stays that will run from Friday afternoon until Sunday morning. A week or weekend at Nimrod will recharge your whole family to face the wonderful, yet exhausting, reality of life in 2014.
Going to Nimrod Hall is the best gift you can give yourself and your family.
