Tips Inn on Lake Anna

The History of the original Tip’s Inn goes back to the 1920′s, when my grandfather started a business  in Berlin Pennsylvania where people could come to eat, roller skate, and just relax.   The Original Tip’s Inn was really a picnic grove with a lot of added features.  The most notable feature was the roller rink which included table tennis and a pool table.  My dad and uncle worked in the rink for admissions and maintaining and renting the skates.   The second feature was a very early drive-through restaurant.  It was located in the front part of the house, proximal to the roller rink.  My grandmother would make sandwiches and such and pass them through a window to people waiting in their automobile.  Ice cream was made and sold at the restaurant.  My dad and uncle would collect wild berries and other fruits to flavor the ice cream.  My grandfather was too thrifty to clean the commercial type ice cream maker between flavors, because there would be wasted product.  The solution to this was to start with vanilla in the morning, then go to a light flavor like banana, then a stronger flavor like cherry, and so on through the strongest flavor like eldeberry.  The story is told that some families would stay all day until each member was able to get his or her favorite flavor.  My uncle also spoke of the  ”pop trough”.  This was a trough (I do not know of what material) in front of the store where bottled soda pop was kept for self service sale.  Cold water was piped through the trough from a well or spring to cool the bottles.  I believe this may have been inspired from the home on the farm where my grandfather grew up.  In the walk-in cellar, under the house was a spring that was directed into a hewn stone trough.  The cold water chilled butter,  milk and anything else that needed to be kept cold.   Tips Inn had a picnic grove behind the buildings.  It was equipped as a normal picnic grove of the era.  It was sometimes reserved (for a fee) for family reunions or other get-togethers.  Traveling single families used it also.         

 Depression era survival meant being creative.  At the back of the picnic grove were several simple frame cabins raised up on blocks or wood pilings.  The unique thing about these cabins is that they were portable.  The cabins were actually two halves that were tacked together and roof sealed when in use.  Back then, before air conditioning, things got hot and sticky in the big city during the summer  and people of means wanted to escape this.  These people would lease a plot in the country, by a large stream or small river, for the family to stay while their dad commuted to the city to work.  Many would camp in tents.  But, those with more money could rent one of my grandfather’s cabins.  He would make two trips with an old flat bed truck to haul the cabin to the campground and set them up for the season. Then haul them back to Tips Inn in the fall. 

 My grandfather also ran a “sugar camp” at Tip’s Inn during the spring maple tree sap run.  The sweet sugar maple sap was collected in special buckets hung on the tapped trees, then collected into a large vat on a horse drawn wagon or sled.  Once transported back to the sugar camp, the sap was boiled down into syrup.  Most sugar camps of the day boiled the sap in a large shallow pan-like trough over open fire.  This resulted in some ash and smoke settling in the syrup making it dark colored and altering the taste a bit.  My grandfather was a genious in how he boiled his sap down.  His boiling operation was in a large space below the roller rink building.  It was under roof, so no foreign material could drop in the boiling sap from above.  His real genious was to use the coal fired boiler that heated the roller rink to create steam to heat and boil the sap.  No ash, no smoke, nothing to contaminate the syrup.  His product was clearer, more honey colored than his competetors.  I remember a snippit of conversation with Grandpa where he told me that there were years with “bad sap runs” and they sold the inferior syrup to tobacco companies, to use to flavor chewing tobacco.           

  Today, the drive through restaurant has been re-converted to a front entrance.  The pop trough is long gone.  The roller rink burned down when owned by an “absentee owner” under suspicious circumstances.  Some of the property has been sold off.  Some modular homes sit where the rink’s parking area and front part of the rink had been located. The original Tip’s Inn  is now a privately owned home.

Tips Inn on Lake Anna was purchased by my mom in 1989.  Even though she never rented it, she always called it Tips Inn just because of my grandfather’s business and the history of it.  The house has been extensively renovated since it was purchased.  Once my wife and I obtained the property, we knew that we would like to rent it to other families to enjoy, and we knew we would call it Tips Inn.