Chester Pierce Munroe and his mother, Annie
Hopkins Munroe, at the Grove Park Inn,
Asheville, NC, ca. 1913.
Chester Pierce Munroe was born in 1889 in Providence, RI; he was one of two sons of
Addison P. Munroe and Annie Burnside Hopkins. The family had deep roots in New
England—Annie had seven colonial ancestors and Addison was descended from Richard
Warren, who arrived on the Mayflower, and Isaac Pierce of Rehoboth, a private in the
Revolutionary Army (this relationship caused Chester to apply for membership in the
U.S. Sons of the American Revolution early in 1913).
Chester attended the Slater Avenue Primary and Grammar School, where he became a
close friend of the author H.P. Lovecraft, who lived only a few blocks away. They appear
to have met in the fall of 1902. Chester graduated from Hope High School and in the
1910 U.S. census he listed his profession as a hotel clerk. In 1913 he was working as a
traveling salesman, and he would go back and forth between these two careers for the rest
of his life. Not long after, he was recruited to work at the brand new Grove Park Inn in
Asheville, North Carolina. This impressive and now-famous hotel opened in July 1913
(with William Jennings Bryan as speaker) and Chester must have started work there
almost immediately.
In 1915, H.P. Lovecraft described his close friend in an essay:
Chester P. Munroe was always of literary tastes. Even in the old Slater
Avenue days he used to write short stories in moments snatched from the
study of his regular lessons, and in later years he became the author of
more than one unpublished novel. His geographical description of
Switzerland, composed a few years ago, inspired the Conservative
[Lovecraft] to scribble off some complimentary verses.
On June 3, 1917, he married Missouri-born Mary Doris Davenport and on the next day he
registered for the World War I draft, claiming a physical disability. By this time he was a
bookkeeper and cashier at the Grove Park, and by 1918 had been promoted to chief clerk.
Children came in quick succession: daughter Charlotte was born in 1918 and son Chester
Jr. in 1921. By the time of young Chester’s birth, Chester Sr. had left the Grove Park and
was working as a bank clerk in Asheville. He also demonstrated his continuing interest in
New England genealogy when, in 1924, he was elected secretary-treasurer of the
Organization of the Society of Mayflower Descendants in the State of North Carolina.
Soon after, his situation deteriorated. Whether he lost his job, or failed to adjust to
domesticity, or was disappointed by unfulfilled literary dreams, or disillusioned by North
Carolina, by the time of the 1930 census, Chester was back living with his parents in
Providence and working as a traveling salesman in mill supplies. Doris was still living
with the two children in Asheville. Both claimed still to be married.
In 1935 he was living in Northampton, MA, but by 1940, he had gone back into the hotel
business, working as a clerk (and living) at the Taunton Hotel in Taunton, MA.
His son Chester Jr. was caught up in the World War II draft in 1942, at which point he
too was working at the Grove Park. He died in the crash of a training bomber in Colorado
in July, 1943.
Chester’s daughter Charlotte married her sweetheart, Vivian Dorsett “Jack” Loving, after
the war in 1946; sadly she died later that same year.
But Chester was not to see the death of his second child; he himself died in Taunton, MA
a few weeks before Christmas in 1943. The Providence Journal death notice described
him as a “prominent hotel man.”
Doris Davenport Munroe was still residing in Asheville at the time of her death in 1991,
almost fifty years after the sudden deaths of her husband and both children within a three-
year period. She was 98 years old.
Catherine Beyer Hurst, MBA, Writer and Community Historian
Further Reading
Joshi, S.T. H.P. Lovecraft: A Life. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1996.
Lovecraft, Howard P. “Introducing Mr. Chester Pierce Munroe.” The Conservative, April
1915.