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After President Bush's wife, Laura, and members of Congress were whisked to an undisclosed location after the Sept. 11 holocaust, area newspapers implied that Mount Weather was their destination.

Known locally as "The Mountain," or "Up on 601" -- the number of the state route bisecting the facility -- Mount Weather is one of many rural underground retreats where the U.S. government can continue to work during threatening times.

In peacetime, during such catastrophes as floods, hurricanes or tornadoes, Mount Weather is home to numerous phone banks, where employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) record callers' damages and determine their eligibility for financial assistance.

Its name dates from 1902 or 1903, when the U.S. Weather Bureau bought 100 acres of a 1,750-foot plateau, straddling the border of Loudoun and Clarke counties. A year later, after Round Hill's Arch Simpson and crew -- the area's leading builders -- completed a stone observatory on the flats there. National Geographic Magazine ingrained Mount Weather in the national vocabulary with its only article ever on Loudoun County and the Virginia Piedmont.

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The article, titled "Scientific Work of Mount Weather Meteorological Research Observatory," was written by Frank H. Bigelow, of the weather bureau.

Mount Weather is nearly midway between the villages of Bluemont and Paris. Its role as a communications center began in 1868, when the Blue Ridge rise was known as Frasier's Hill, having been purchased in 1859 by Townsend Frasier Sr., known by locals as "the cattle king of Loudoun County."

Atop the hill in 1868, Mahlon Loomis, a Massachusetts dentist, invented wireless telegraphy by flying a kite and wire, grounded to a telegraph key, into a large cloud. A second kite-and-wire apparatus, grounded nine miles to the east on Mount Gilead, was flown into the same cloud. The cloud's electrostatic charge then became the contact between the two wired kites and their telegraph keys on the ground.

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Loomis patented his wireless system in 1872 and chartered his Loomis Aerial Telegraph Co. That year, Congress authorized a $50,000 grant to the company to continue experimenting, but President Ulysses S. Grant, concerned about the country's financial depression, did not sign the bill. Discouraged, Loomis died three years later. His meticulously recorded data rest in the National Archives.

The top of the Blue Ridge then languished until 1893, when Simpson and his crew built the four-story frame Blue Ridge Inn four miles north of Frasier's Hill. Under the able management of Col. Daniel Grosvenor and Jules DeMonet, a former White House chef, the inn -- near a large outcrop of rocks known as Bear's Den overlooking the Shenandoah Valley -- became a summer tourist attraction.

With completion of the Southern Railway to nearby Snickersville in 1900, and a change of the village's name to the more alluring Bluemont, visitors built vacation homes atop the Blue Ridge. The houses were eclectic, many bearing the names of such Alpine chalets as Johannisberg, Selsenhorst and Hohenheim. The entire settlement became known as The Blue Ridge Mountain Colony.

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Residents included many prominent Washingtonians and Virginians, among them John Fox Jr., the popular writer of Appalachian novels. It was his 1908 bestseller, "Trail of the Lonesome Pine," that inspired the 1912 song of that name, with its famous first line, "In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia." Thus, the rutted top-of-the-crest road linking Bluemont and Paris soon took the name Blue Ridge Mountain Road.

Amid the colony, the weather bureau began its experiments, noted in Bigelow's obtuse writings as dealing with "meteorological physics . . . ionization and radioactivity of the air and of soils . . . [and] signs in the sunspots and photosphere."

In simple English, balloons and kites were sent aloft to measure air currents and the composition of air in the upper atmosphere. In May 1910, nine box kites the size of telephone booths, attached by piano wire to instruments on the ground, set an altitude record of 4 1/2 miles.

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In his book "Mountain Lore," Joseph Davitt, who lives atop the ridge, quotes Jeannette Westcott, a visiting Philadelphian, on the weather station in 1908:

"The welcome at Mt. Weather is always a warm one. . . . We went there one morning when the men were flying their kites -- five kites out on miles of fine wire. It is great fun to watch them come down. It is great fun, too, from the 'sanctum,' so to speak, to watch the general public make inspection, hear it ask silly questions, and see it keep its distance, which last is sometimes very hard to make it do.

"The Kite House, with its balloon, its kites, its records and its patient, able teacher, is of great interest; so, too the Magnetic House, with its thick walls, its three set of windows to keep out heat and cold alike, and its costly instruments. It is intensely interesting to go through such a place, especially when everything is explained in such a kindly way."

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Gilbert Fowler, who has lived in the area all his life and visited the weather station when he was in his teens, recalled that "Mount Weather welcomed everyone."

"My uncle, Ernest Fowler, and his wife, Annie, were the caretakers, well into the '30s," he said. "They took in summer boarders and boarded teachers [who taught] at the Mount Weather School, one of those few stone one-roomers left" standing.

As vacationers in their automobiles began to outnumber railroad travelers, with the autos wending their way well beyond the Blue Ridge, airplanes were replacing kites. The high-altitude experiments at Mount Weather waned, and in 1920, the weather station closed.

Two presidents then looked at the site, envisioning it as a summer retreat. In 1928, during the waning months of Calvin Coolidge's term, he suggested to the weather bureau that an expenditure of about $25,000 could convert the 100-acre site into such a retreat. "High, healthful, secluded and accessible to good fishing and bridle paths," the Clarke County Chamber of Commerce noted.

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Herbert Hoover, the next president, also looked at the site but only briefly, for the area did not meet his requirements: streams stocked with trout within walking distance and an elevation above 2,500 feet so there would be no mosquitoes. So, in 1929, he chose Madison County, Va., for his presidential retreat, to be known as Camp Rapidan, costing $114,000. Hoover paid the bills.

In the early 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's cabinet and staff used Mount Weather as a retreat to discuss policy. Their frequent visits prompted the state to gravel Blue Ridge Mountain Road from the retreat to Route 7 in 1935. But that stretch was not paved until 1956.

In 1936, the U.S. Bureau of Mines took over Mount Weather. Test borings had indicated that the metamorphosed basalt was dense, ideal for testing mining drills, and the shafts were not likely to cave in.

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Gilbert Fowler, hired by the bureau in 1938, then began his 20-year career at Mount Weather.

"I had been farming at Springsbury [in Clarke County], making a dollar a day," he said. "Then I made two a day at a portable sawmill. But I was working 10 hours, and the bureau paid me two dollars a day for working eight hours. The tunnels we dug were seven feet by seven feet. They weren't enlarged until 1953, when the U.S. government [Army Corps of Engineers] came in.

"Mount Weather was open [to visitors] until about that time. Boy Scouts used to camp there after hiking the [original] Appalachian Trail," which cut through the area in the late 1930s.

"During the war, about 200 conscientious objectors were housed at Mount Weather," Fowler said. "I think they were drawing maps for the Army. We didn't associate with them too much."

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In 1978, I spoke with a driver who brought "some big computers" up to "The Mountain," as he called it. "Maybe it was 20 years ago or so," he told me. The cargo was unloaded onto his truck at the Berryville railroad station, "and a white man in a suit sat down beside me.

"I liked to make conversation, but this fellow didn't say anything except 'turn here.' He never looked at me. We turned off Route 7 on one of those back dirt roads toward Frogtown. I'd heard that even the sheriff wouldn't go into Frogtown, sort of a rough area [of] mountain people.

"I began to get scared. It wasn't safe for a black man to be riding in that area with a strange character who wouldn't even tell you his name.

"So after another 'turn here,' near the top of the mountain, I told the government man I needed to take a leak. And I got out of the truck and ran.

"When I came to work next day and told my boss, he understood. He said, 'They're doing some pretty scary things up on The Mountain.' "

Eugene Scheel is a Waterford historian and mapmaker.

The first Mount Weather observatory, above in a 1904 postcard, burned down in 1907. The second observatory, below in a drawing from 1908 photo, was built in 1908 and still stands.

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