RICHMOND, VA. ? Over the river and through the woods to Grandma’s house won’t do for Mom or, for that matter, Grandma on Mother’s Day. A proper celebration includes going out for brunch or lunch, along with a spouse, son or daughter to pay the tab.

That’s why the century-old Jefferson Hotel on the fringe of Richmond’s downtown will feed more than 750 people today in its soaring rotunda and adjacent rooms and balconies. More than 300 others were on a waiting list in April, hoping for cancellations.

Many will come from out of town for the grand Mother’s Day event, even some who make an annual pilgrimage.

“Many Richmonders and repeat hotel guests have made celebrating holidays at The Jefferson a real tradition,” says Pat Manning, the hotel’s assistant manager.

A popular setting

The operation requires 80 hotel employees to convert the hotel’s common areas and meeting rooms to an elegant food bazaar, prepare up to 50 food items and entrees, coordinate four seatings at 90-minute intervals and clean it all up.

The Jefferson begins taking reservations for Mother’s Day Brunch in November and often sells out as early as February. There’s brunch every Sunday and Christmas Day, but Mother’s Day and Easter draw more than twice an average turnout. The hotel, rated five-star by Mobil, offers special overnight Sunday brunch packages for two, starting at $350, including parking, taxes and gratuity.

The Jefferson, which opened in 1895, is an ivory-tinted stack of towers, rooms, arches and gables that reflect Beaux Arts and Renaissance revival interpretations. It survived fires, neglect, mismanagement, depressed economies and at least one misconception — that the majestic marble stairs from the lobby to the rotunda were where Rhett confronted Scarlet in the film “Gone with the Wind.”

Not true, confirms assistant manager Manning, although the staircase may have been an inspiration for the movie set.

“It’s very interesting, this myth, about the filming here,” she says, “Even though we tell people it was not, it seems many want to just believe it was.”

A new statue of Abraham Lincoln and his son, Tad, is shown against the downtown skyline at the National Battlefield Park in Richmond, Va. The statue is one of the newest historical attractions in the city.

Historical tours

There’s truth enough about The Jefferson to go around. Live alligators lounged in the marble pools in the Palm Court upper lobby until the last one, named Old Pompey, died in 1948. Today, a must-see in any history tour of Richmond is the massive sculpture in the lobby of the hotel’s namesake, Thomas Jefferson.

Commissioned by the entrepreneur who opened the hotel, the Jefferson statue took two years to construct. The artist, Edward Valentine, used clothes worn by Jefferson to fashion his likeness. Valentine even helped drag the statue out of the hotel during a 1901 inferno that destroyed more than half the new building.

There are plenty of other attractions in the Richmond area. The hills of Hollywood Cemetery where James Monroe, John Tyler and Jefferson Davis are buried can provide historical perspective as well as exercise. Across the river and farther south lies the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens, 25 acres of springtime blossoms regarded by local boosters as the equal of any display of perennials of the East Coast.

Nearer to The Jefferson, visitors can create a self-guided walking tour of downtown Richmond that includes the 18th-century home of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, where Robert E. Lee worshipped, and the Virginia State Capitol, designed by Thomas Jefferson.

A half mile from the hotel in Jackson Ward is the Maggie L. Walker National Historical Site, a Victorian-style home whose resident overcame poverty to become an African-American editor, civic leader and the first woman in the United States to become a bank president.

It takes a trip across the Shockoe Bottom to find St. John’s Church. Guides offer presentations describing the Second Virginia Convention that met in the wooden landmark in March 1775.

Jefferson, George Washington, Richard Henry Lee and a mercurial colonist named Patrick Henry participated. When Henry finally spoke, his words — “As for me, give me liberty or give me death” — propelled Virginia into the American Revolution.