As a child, I spent time at the Blue Ridge property visiting my grandparents, who lived and worked at the Blue Ridge Sanitorium. My grandmother had moved to the Sanitorium in the mid-1950s, as a patient diagnosed with tuberculosis. She met and married her second husband at Blue Ridge. After they were both released as patients, they worked at the Sanitorium and lived on the property in a house that was subdivided into four apartments.

Fast forward several decades to 1986, when my husband and I were both graduate students at UVA. I was earning my MA in Communications and my husband, Steve, was earning his MBA at Darden. My grandparents still lived in Charlottesville at the time, now in an apartment in town. We were blessed with the opportunity to have a top-notch education at UVA and more time with my grandparents.

In June 2017, I found myself in Charlottesville again for the birth of our first grandchild. Our grandson decided that he wanted his mom to spend four days in labor in the hospital before he was born. By day three, my husband and I decided that we could spend the morning away from the hospital. I had fuzzy memories of my childhood visits to the Blue Ridge Sanatorium and I suggested that we try to find it.

I had no idea at all where the property might be located since I had only visited there as a child. As my husband and I searched online for an address, we learned that the Sanatorium had been converted to the Blue Ridge Hospital in the 70s and that it had closed for good in 1996.

We learned that the property was located off Highway 20, in a large green triangle between Monticello, Piedmont Virginia Community College, and Charlottesville’s southern border. So we headed that way, relying on my childhood memories to direct us. We stopped and asked a policeman if he was familiar with the old Sanatorium and he let us know that we were within a mile of its front gate.

After walking around the valley for a few minutes, memories started to resurface. I remembered the big cypress trees that I had played under as a little girl, I remembered the small chapel and the big mansion house, and my memory of the red brick house where my grandparents lived was starting to defog in my mind. As we walked up the rough gravel road in the middle of the property, I recognized what I thought was their house, just off the road, on the right, and down a few steps.

As fate would have it, we crossed paths that afternoon with one of the two residents on the property. We were technically trespassing so I quickly explained that I was reliving childhood memories and I was relieved when they responded kindly and invited us to take a walk around the property. We exchanged contact information as we departed.

Later that afternoon I received a text from the residential caretaker of the property, inviting us back for a tour of the property. Two days later we returned for a tour with John and his keys. When John unlocked the front door of the boarded-up and run-down red brick house, my heart did a summersault. This was my grandparents’ home. This was the home where the smell of green beans cooked with bacon used to greet us; where the old lady who lived across the hall used to give us Mary Jane candy; where my grandmother, who had a 7th grade education and a heart of gold, loved us as grandchildren.

As we walked the rest of the property, breathing in the spectacular surroundings, I knew that my heart was falling in love with this magnificent setting. This property that had served patients first as a sanitorium and then as a hospital spoke to me, letting me know that it had not yet finished its time as a place of healing.

When we returned home to Atlanta, I shared my vision with my husband. All I knew at this point was that the Blue Ridge property needed to service the medically under-served, and honor my grandmother, who not only survived the dangers of tuberculosis but also survived the abuse of an alcoholic first husband.