Just “Sam” to many

Few people are so well-known that all you have to do is
mention a first name and everyone knows who you mean.

For many years around Morgan County, whenever you referred to “Sam,” people figured you meant Sam Ashelman, the founder of Coolfont Resort and local activist, who died last week at age 97.

Sam had already had a full career in business and government before being attracted to Cold Run Valley during a camping trip with his son Randall about 50 years ago. Soon he was enlisting family and friends into his dream of a different kind of resort over the ridge from Berkeley Springs.
In 1961, he teamed with local residents Alden and Rol Capen and developed the basic plan for Coolfont Re+Creation. Beginning with camping, lakes and trail rides, Coolfont gradually grew, adding a restaurant, cabins and a small inn. Then came a housing development on the hillside and a health spa and indoor pool, not to mention concerts, lectures and all sorts of events.

From the start, there was an emphasis on nature and a pro-environmental aura about the place. Al Capen, for instance, gave nature walks and was dubbed Coolfont’s naturalist. Even in the Mountainside development, the houses seemed to blend into the woods.

The “Re+Creation” of the original Coolfont name came from the writings of Henry David Thoreau, a favorite of Capen’s. It suggested that stressed-out urbanites could regenerate through their contact with nature and their time in the mountains.

For many of us, Coolfont provided one of our first jobs and some stayed on for careers. For other folks, a weekend at Coolfont provided their first taste of Morgan County and they would come back again and sometimes buy property here.

Coolfont’s importance to the local economy was never clearer than when the resort closed down a few years ago, after being purchased by Freeman Companies, Inc. You could feel the loss of visitors and jobs in the Berkeley Springs area.

A strong personality, Sam kept spinning out ideas into his nineties. In later years, he told us of his idea for a retreat at which diplomats going to China could learn Chinese ways, and Chinese coming to America could learn our ways.

And he never stopped talking about the need to protect the environment – promoting geothermal energy, warning of global warming in letters to the editor, sponsoring free showings of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” movie.

Sam Ashelman’s was certainly a life fully lived.