“When you got old enough,” Frances Walker Hill told this writer, “you could go up to Miss Lucy Brown’s Mountain View at Hillsboro, back of Piedmont Baptist Church. She ran a hotel, ballgame diamond, a dance hall, and whatever, you name it. People would come there and stay during the summer. It was a gorgeous place.”
Mrs. Lucy Anne Partello (Brown) (1864?–1961) was born in Fulton County, Georgia. (Some accounts list her birth as 1864; others have it in 1873.) She married Jamaican-born Andrew Davidson Brown, a Methodist minister, in 1916. That same year, she became a deeded half-owner with a life interest to a 74-acre farm near Hillsboro in western Albemarle County. Andrew and Lucy welcomed a daughter a year later in West Virginia where Andrew was serving a church.
Rev. Brown enlisted with the U.S. Army in 1918, and served during WWI as a U.S. Army Chaplain with the 348th Field Artillery, 92nd Division. First Lieutenant Brown was discharged in 1919, and resumed his work in Christian ministry.
Meanwhile, back on the farm at Hillsboro, steady improvements were being made, and a fruit orchard was planted. With the ever-increasing automobile traffic on nearby Jefferson Highway, the house was enlarged with an eye toward offering basic services to African American travelers. At first those amenities were limited to a clean bed and a good, hot meal, but the hospitable, business-minded Lucy Brown envisioned amenities which would entice the public to stay a little longer, to relax and enjoy themselves…