Retreat

Eighteen hundred feet up the Blue Ridge, hard by Snicker's Gap, where Turner Ashby's grey cavalry thundered through to join Jackson in the Valley, stands a fine brick building faced with ten cinctured columns. About are smaller structures, a laboratory, stable, power plant. Once it was an important U. S. weather observatory; but for 15 years it has stood empty in the mountain wind.

Last week President Coolidge designated it as his choice for a hot-weather week-end retreat for future Presidents of the U. S. He asked Congress for $48,000 to remodel it. It would not be a Summer White House, to which the President would move for a long stay. It would simply be a week-end retreat, an escape from the sticky heat of the low Potomac Valley.

Mount Weather, as the $500,000 abandoned station is called, sits in an 87-acre tract, six miles up a rocky road from Bluemont, Va. Washington, east by southeast, lies 55 miles away over fair dirt roads-- an easy journey for the Presidential motor of a Friday afternoon.