Paul Goodloe McIntire's Rivanna: The Unexecuted Plans for a River City

By: Daniel Bluestone and Steven G. Meeks

Paul Goodloe McIntire (1860-1952) enjoyed considerable success in business and philanthropy. The son of a Charlottesville druggist, McIntire grew up adjacent to downtown on High Street. He attended the University of Virginia for a single term, leaving to enter business in Chicago. In 1896, he purchased a seat on the Chicago Stock Exchange and later took a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. After World War I, McIntire began using his substantial investment wealth to build Charlottesville institutions and to shape its broad civic landscape. At the University of Virginia he endowed schools of commerce, music, and art, and he constructed a large outdoor amphitheater. He took the lead in Charlottesville’s City Beautiful embellishments, building a public library, a high school, monumental civic sculptures, and public parks. McIntire’s success in these endeavors stood in sharp contrast to his 1920s failure to establish a major public park and a psychiatric hospital on lands along the Rivanna River.
If McIntire had been as successful on the Rivanna as he had been in other areas, Charlottesville would have had a very different urban form, maintaining a much more palpable relationship to the river. Rather than receding from the consciousness of local residents, as it did in the second half of the twentieth century, the river, one of the region’s most significant environmental, cultural, and historical resources, would have continued to engage the interest, energy, and imagination of Charlottesville citizens. This essay explores the changing importance of the Rivanna River for Charlottesville residents as a way of better understanding McIntire’s riverside visions.

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Charlottesville Art Deco: A Coca-Cola Story

By: Daniel Bluestone

In the 1920s, Charlottesville’s residential and commercial landscape boomed. Architects and builders constructed new stores, hotels, and offices downtown and new houses and residential subdivisions in the surrounding sections of the city. By contrast, in the 1930s private development largely stood still. In the midst of a national economic depression one project stood out. Doran S. Platt (1884-1965) designed a new Art Deco Coca-Cola Bottling Works for the southeast corner of Preston Avenue and Eighth Street; it captured the imagination of residents and journalists who felt it pointed to the revival of “extensive construction activity,” and a new “building boom.” Charlottesville’s architects had long relied on revered Jeffersonian architectural traditions, even for relatively modern building types, such as the National Bank of Charlottesville skyscraper designed by Marsh & Peter in 1919-1920, the Monticello Hotel skyscraper designed by Johnson & Brannan in 1925-1926, and the Paramount Theater designed by Rapp & Rapp in 1930-1931. Platt’s Art Deco design for Coca-Cola rejected local architectural tradition for a modern form that gestured more emphatically toward the future than the past. The design seemed to point optimistically towards a world of progress and prosperity, beyond the Great Depression. As if to put an exclamation point on the project, the bottling works on Preston Avenue supplanted a Coca-Cola building on Tenth Street, which was barely a dozen years old, and which Walter L. Sams (1886-1965), the bottling company’s president, had pointed to proudly in 1927 as new and up-to-date. Focusing on the Coca-Cola Bottling Works on Preston Avenue, this essay will explore the architectural form and the economic and social meaning of Charlottesville’s anomalous Art Deco architecture.

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Dates and Dashes: The Harris Family Cemetery and the Lives of a Few of Its Residents

By: Joanne L. Yeck

Many years ago, a survey was made of historic cemeteries in Albemarle County. A typewritten, undated description of the Harris Family Cemetery simply states that it is located “at the intersection of Rt. 6 and Rt. 717, about eight miles west of Scottsville. There is a Revolutionary War soldier buried here.” Legible markers were transcribed. Several unmarked and illegible graves were noted.
Today, the beautiful, stone-walled cemetery remains as described in the survey, within sight of where Route 6 (Irish Road) meets Route 717 (Old Sand Road), though it is more precisely ten miles west of Scottsville. Sitting quietly shaded by trees, in the shadow of Green Mountain, not far above Green Creek, the grave site was established on the property acquired by William Harris (ca.1712-1788) when this spot was virgin land and part of an enormous Goochland County. Harris was an educated man, whose family had settled in York County in the seventeenth century. By the mid-1740s, William had married and moved west with his wife and two small children. Doing his part to establish a new, more civilized life on Virginia’s frontier, in November of 1745, he cleared a road from “his plantation on Green Creek to the South River on the lower side of Barringer’s Creek.” The same year, he was made a vestryman for the Anglican Church. Later, in 1751, Harris sold his 400 acres on the south fork of Totier Creek to the Anglican Church. The purchasers were church wardens Samuel Jordan and Patrick Napier.

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A Brief Biographical Sketch of Queen Charlotte

By: Kieran K. Matthews

In 1761, George III succeeded to the British throne. Unmarried and lacking an heir, the new King began the imperative search for a royal bride. The Earl of Bute, a close advisor to the young King, dispatched Colonel Graeme to the German states to evaluate potential brides on behalf of the King. “His instructions on this important mission were that she should be perfect in her form, of a pure blood, and healthy constitution, possessed of elegant accomplishments, particularly music, (to which the King was extremely partial,) and of a mild and obliging disposition.” Seventeen year-old Princess Sophie Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the daughter of the heir to a minor German dukedom, proved to be the ideal candidate.
Born May 19, 1744, Charlotte had a modest upbringing, though she received the highest quality schooling in needlework, botany, languages, and religious principles. She was well-educated, versed in music and the arts, and possessed a gentle yet refined character. As the Lady of the Queen’s Bedchamber and a close, lifelong associate of the Queen, Lady Harcourt would later recount:
[Charlotte’s] mind was highly cultivated, she was fond of reading, and well acquainted with the best author—English, German, and French—and her memory was so retentive that she never forgot what she once knew. ...There was a sweetness in her manner and an animation of countenance which caused many who thought her plain before they conversed with her to admire her afterwards. She certainly had no pretensions to beauty, but her hair and teeth were fine, and her eyes expressive. She was not tall, but her figure was good, and her manners remarkably graceful. ...She was strict and sincere in her religious duties, and her love of truth was unbounded. She hated flattery, and despised those who practised it. She was very sensitive, but always seemed to restrain her feelings from principle.
Above:  Queen Charlotte. (Thomas Gainsborough, oil on canvas, 1781. Copyright HM Queen Elizabeth II, 2012.)

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Curves on the Fringe: Meadowbrook Hills and the Rise of Charlottesville's Picturesque Suburbs

By: Daniel Bluestone

New suburban neighborhoods fundamentally transformed Charlottesville’s landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Farm fields immediately adjacent to the city that had earlier grown crops began sprouting houses.  Farmers and their families seemingly turned from harvesting foodstuffs to harvesting cash as they sold their farms for residential development.  Accommodating the city’s expanding population, real estate developers and builders subdivided the city’s immediate hinterland into house lots and graded streets.  In many cases they also built sewer, water, gas, and electrical lines along with new houses.  As the city expanded, it took on a modern architectural and landscape form, connected to the historic downtown by new technologies like electric streetcars, automobiles, and telephone service.  Charlottesville residents complemented their commitments to the modern suburb, technologically enabled, with a countervailing interest in the simpler forms of nature and history, steeped in Romanticism.  This essay will explore Charlottesville’s Meadowbrook Hills subdivision, developed during the 1910s by the Redland Land Company.  Planned on 200 acres of F. Berger Moran’s Meadow Creek Farm, Meadowbrook Hills featured a flowing curvilinear street plan and residential lots of over one acre that helped establish it as Charlottesville’s leading picturesque suburban neighborhood.  This essay will also focus on one of the first houses constructed in Meadowbrook Hills.  Designed by Eugene Bradbury, the W. Allan Perkins and Hazelhurst Bolton Perkins House expressed the tension between tradition and modernity that accompanied the reshaping of Charlottesville’s suburban fringe.

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Why "Big I"?

By: Robert W. Tatum, Jr.

For collectors of Confederate memoirs one coveted item is a small volume written by William Nathaniel (Nat) Wood of Charlottesville bearing the intriguing title, Reminiscences of Big I. Wood’s story was first published between April and December 1895 in a series of articles that appeared in the local newspaper, The Daily Progress. Shortly after his death in 1909, the articles appeared in book form as printed by The Michie Company, also of Charlottesville.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, aspiring writers occasionally turned to vanity presses when their efforts could not attract the interest of established publishing companies. Newspapers frequently undertook private printing jobs, as did general or “job” printers, but the author had to underwrite printing costs and was responsible for whatever distribution or sales that followed. Consequently, the number of printed copies was usually quite small. Surprisingly, however, some of the most desirable books first appeared as vanity products despite negative connotations that often attach. Wood’s book, Reminiscences of Big I, was printed in a run of only 200 copies and thus is very scarce and collectible in the first edition.

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Memoirs of Leroy Wesley Cox: Experiences of a Young Soldier of the Confederacy

By: As Related to Ruth Ritchie. Edited and with an Introduction by Robert W. Tatum, Jr. and Richard L. Nicholas.

In 1849, the family of Dr. William and Mary Elizabeth Lacy Cox moved to Charlottesville from their ancestral home near Overton in Albemarle County. The Coxes lived initially at Midway on Ridge Street, before it was converted into a public school. Afterwards, Dr. Cox purchased what was known as the “Flat-Iron-Corner” at Main and Preston Avenue from the Craven estate which remained in the family for seventy years.

Dr. Cox was a prominent citizen in the community and had six children- four sons and two daughters, and when Virginia sounded the call for volunteers in the Confederate Army in 1861, all four of the sons enlisted. Leroy Wesley Cox was the youngest son, being only fifteen-and-a-half years old at the time, and his brother Azelle Donop was a little over seventeen. Leroy, Azelle, and another brother Eugene M. all enlisted in Charlottesville on June 15, 1861 in a unit that was initially called the Border Guards, captained by R.G. Crank.  Shortly thereafter, the Border Guards were incorporated into the Wise Legion stationed in southwest Virginia, and became Company D of the 46th Virginia Infantry Regiment.  The fourth brother, Lucian, joined the 19th Virginia Infantry Regiment and was killed in a railway accident near Hanover Junction in 1862.

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Monticello During the Civil War

By: Sam Towler

As I was growing up in Charlottesville, the first interesting story I remember hearing about my mother’s family, the Baileys, was that they lived at Monticello during and after the Civil War.  In 2001, two books came out about the Levy ownership of Monticello; neither mention the Baileys, there are few details of the African-Americans at the house, and there are a few incorrect facts about Joel Wheeler.  Wheeler was resident at Monticello at the time, and he is the link with the Bailey family.  Since the most knowledgeable member of the family on the subject, E. L. Bailey of Sunnyfields farm near Monticello, died in 1962,  I started this narrative with some oral history, but have relied mostly on my own research.

The Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia states: “Because Jefferson died more than $107,000 in debt, his daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph and her son and financial manager, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, found it necessary first to sell nearly all of the contents of Monticello and then to sell the plantation itself.  In 1827, the furniture, animals, farm equipment, and slaves were offered at an executor’s sale.  In 1831, Dr. James T. Barclay purchased the home and 552 acres for $4,500, less the value of his own home.  He offered Monticello for sale barely two years later.  In 1834, Uriah P. Levy, a naval officer who admired Jefferson’s views on religious tolerance, purchased the house.”  Levy also bought another farm, called the Washington farm, to the east of Ash Lawn, which had been owned by James Monroe.  In 1835, Levy purchased Aggy Dickerson from the Minor family.  She became his cook and the main enslaved person at Monticello.  Aggy married John William West, who was probably purchased soon after Aggy.  By 1853, Levy had hired Ira Chapman Garrison as his farm manager.

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A Most Valuable Citizen: A Profile of Randolph Jefferson

By: Joanne L. Yeck

Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens.
Thomas Jefferson
Randolph Jefferson was born in Albemarle County at Shadwell on October 1, 1755.  The only surviving brother of Thomas Jefferson, Randolph led a quiet, local life, dying short of his 60th birthday on August 7, 1815.  While the brothers led very separate lives, they shared their Albemarle roots, family culture, and, after Thomas’ retirement from public life, the pursuits and concerns of planters in central Virginia.

Randolph and his twin sister, Anna Scott Jefferson, were not yet 2 years old when their father, Peter Jefferson, died on August 17, 1757.  Thomas, age 14, was already away at school, leaving Randolph to grow up in a household filled with females.  Their mother, Jane Randolph (b. February 21, 1721, OS) was a mature 36-year-old when her husband died.  In addition to his twin, Anna Scott, Randolph had five other sisters, then ranging in age from 4 to 17 years old.

...conclusions about Randolph’s intelligence and personality have generally been drawn from more incriminating sources, lending to his portrait as an unintelligent man.  Over the years, such negative sources have been quoted again and again, and often embellished, without context or critical evaluation.  More often, what is known about Randolph Jefferson has been used to dismiss him as historically insignificant, rather than to understand him as the proprietor of Snowden and an upstanding citizen of Buckingham County, Virginia.

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Orchestrating Experience: The Context and Design of Charlottesville's Pedestrian Mall

By: Nathan Foley

Thirty-seven years ago, a bold vision was drafted for the transformation of downtown Charlottesville by the renowned design firm of Lawrence Halprin Associates (LHA).  Their plan sought to transform a fragmented and economically struggling downtown into a networked and vibrant urban district.  While most Charlottesville residents and visitors are familiar with the built legacy of this plan, the pedestrian mall on Main Street, the innovative and expansive vision that LHA had for the entirety of the downtown district, remains a mystery to most.  “The mall,” as it is known to residents, was intended to be one piece of a networked system of public spaces that integrated the 18th-century historical fabric of the area with the proposed uses of a rejuvenated downtown.  The majority of this urban design vision remains unrealized and the mall, although it eventually developed into one of the most successful pedestrian streets in the country, still exists in relative isolation from the remainder of the downtown district. 

By the time they arrived in Charlottesville in 1973, the architects of LHA were considered experts in urban design, public participation, and landscape architecture.  The firm, founded in 1960 by the celebrated landscape architect Lawrence Halprin (1916-2009), had many years of experience designing landscapes of all scales, from intimate courtyard gardens to rapid transportation systems.  They were a group convinced by how public space could transform the livelihoods of city residents and the role that public space played in the acting out of everyday life.  The firm’s designs were derived from the city itself:  its setting, people, history, and materials.  In the 1963 publication, Cities, Larry Halprin states, “Though we do not have a clear picture of the ideal form of a city, we do have a clear image of the purpose of an ideal city.  This purpose is clearly to make possible a rich and biologically satisfying life for all the city’s people.  What we are really searching for is a creative process, a constantly changing sequence where people are the generators, their creative activities are the aim, and the physical elements are the tools.”  With that attitude, LHA’s vision for downtown Charlottesville extended well beyond the designed object of the pedestrian mall into surrounding neighborhoods.  It focused on healing many of the physical and social rifts caused by a decade of urban renewal and a history of racial tensions by creating a vibrant, economically diverse, and networked city center.  Within LHA’s urban design vision for downtown Charlottesville, the pedestrian mall played an important catalyzing role but was one part of a system of integrated public spaces.  It is within the context of this larger vision that the specific design of the mall can be understood:  its spaces, materials, connections, views, and evolving social role.

Article continues in the 2010 printed issue…

A Pedestrian Mall Born Out of Urban Renewal

By: Sarita M. Herman

The downtown of Charlottesville, Virginia embodies changes that took place in American city planning from the mid-twentieth century to the late-twentieth century. The most powerful element of this change was a shift away from a demolition-oriented program known as urban renewal, to a more socially conscious, preservation-oriented form of planning. This change is best understood through a comparison of the work of two national firms that made a major impact on the form and identity of the city: Harland Bartholomew & Associates (HB&A - principal planner Robert Martin) in the late-1950s - early-1970s and Lawrence Halprin Associates (LHA - principal designer Dean Abbott) from 1973-76. This juxtaposition reveals why LHA’s plan to revitalize the city has succeeded where HB&A’s failed.

Today, the pedestrian Mall at the heart of the central business district, or CBD, designed by Lawrence Halprin Associates from 1973-6, is bursting with life and activity in spite of the economic downturn of recent years. Halprin’s Mall facilitates living, civic gathering, entertainment, and business downtown. As evidence of the Mall’s importance, City Hall has recently spent $6 million on a renovation of Charlottesville’s most prominent public space.  The Mall has become crucial to the identity of the city. It is hard to imagine that this thriving downtown could have been in distress a short time ago. However, a crisis common to American cities created a dire need for large-scale planning efforts in Charlottesville in the mid-twentieth century. Beginning with the great depression of the 1930s, Charlottesville saw a slow but ever apparent decline in the downtown area.  As automobiles encroached upon an ill-equipped infrastructure, businesses fled to suburban areas better suited to support automotive transportation. Auto-friendly suburban neighborhoods appealed to residents, further encouraging a move away from living downtown.  This organizational shift undermined the CBD of Charlottesville, centered on Main Street. Without shoppers living nearby or sufficient space to accommodate parking, the heart of the city could no longer sustain businesses at the level it had in the past. Once vibrant residential neighborhoods began to degrade, while low-rent businesses or, even worse, vacancies, replaced what had been the economic core of the city. Segregation divided the town and created an atmosphere of racial tension. Instability created an identity crisis in the city, which factored heavily in the decisions of city leaders, citizens, and national planning firms over the next half-decade.

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Mapping Highland: A Geo-Temporal Jigsaw Puzzle

By: Christopher Owens

Imagine you are going to work a jigsaw puzzle.  This puzzle is an unusual one.  This picture is blank, but it is supposed to be a map of a landscape at a particular place and time.  Instead of having a box full of neatly made pieces to fit together, you only have written descriptions of the pieces.  You have to figure out where to find these descriptions.  They are very hard to read and not always accurate.  Sometimes, the descriptions do not tell you the shape of the piece, but only that the pieces around it were owned for awhile by someone you have probably never heard of before.  The owners of all the pieces randomly change from time to time, and when they do, the shape of their pieces tends to change, too.  Just to make it more difficult, you do not know how many pieces there are.  To work out this sort of jigsaw puzzle, you have to be crazy and very determined.  You have to identify the shapes of all the pieces as they were at the one particular moment when they fit together properly.  You also have to figure out the outside boundary of your part of the puzzle, because if you don’t, it will go on forever and you will be lost.

I have been working a map puzzle like this.  The boundaries of the puzzle enclose the tracts of land owned by former President James Monroe in Albemarle County, Virginia in the years 1793-1821, which he called Highland.  I have had to find the shapes and locations and owners of all the puzzle pieces bordering Monroe’s, and many more besides, as they existed over a period of more than 100 years.  Apparently, no one else has done this.  Perhaps my having made this effort will mean that no one else will have to.

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Business and Family in Colonial Charlottesville: The History and Legacy of John Day, Blacksmith

By: John F. Day III

1763 was a major turning point for the settlement of Virginia.  The world’s super powers, Great Britain, France, and Spain, settled their bitter Seven Years War with The Treaty of Paris, and brought an end to the conflict that colonialists called the “French and Indian War.”  Under terms of peace, France forfeited its claim to Quebec in exchange for unchallenged control of all lands west of the Mississippi River.  Britain’s colony, Virginia, received uncontested rights to land from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River, including the Northwest Territory and the Great Lakes.

Peace brought a new level of security to the frontier, which, in turn, opened the floodgates for settlement.  Settlers had remained in the lowlands, forcing costal land prices to escalate from Massachusetts to Georgia.  Suddenly, cheap “virgin land” was available in the interior for the taking.  Young Virginians living in the tidelands were biding their time.  The law of colonial Virginia was still primogenitary, where the eldest son inherited the family property.  Second and third sons were destined for a trade, the clergy, the law, or the frontier.  With improved conditions at the frontier, many men saw opportunity in the backcountry.

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The First Hundred Years of the Scottsville Community, 1728-1828

By: Richard L. Nicholas

One of the most historic communities in our county is the Town of Scottsville and the surrounding area. The locality was officially recognized on January 22, 1818 when the General Assembly of Virginia formally authorized the establishment of a town “... at a place on James river called Scott’s Landing in the County of Albemarle ... by the name of Scottsville…,” but the area has a much older history.  In fact, the community’s origins can be traced back to the first significant movement of settlers into the valley of the upper James River during the early 18th century.
 
    The primary factor that led to the settlement and development of this area, and indeed the inexorable 17th- and 18th- century westward migration commensurate with population growth in America, was the availability of virtually free land. It was an era when land was the basis for economic wealth and social status, and a prerequisite for political office. The peopling of virgin lands that accelerated in the early 18th century was fueled by the government’s generous land grant policy. Therefore, it is not surprising that a large number of settlers from the Tidewater and eastern Piedmont section of Virginia migrated westward during that period to places on the frontier like Albemarle County, seeking prosperity and the opportunity for a better life.

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Johnson & Hemming: Our First African American Photographers?

By: Antoinette W. Roades

As is true with so many old photographs of unidentified subjects, the seven here pique instant curiosity. The poised yet relaxed young man, the precariously posed baby, the improbably high-headed young woman, all the rest: Who were these people? What were their lives like? Were they connected in some way? These particular photographs, however, invite more curiosity than most for two reasons.

For one, almost all of the subjects may have been African American. For another, each image bears as the name of its maker either T.M. Hemming or Johnson & Hemming and so calls to mind the African American Hemmings family associated with Monticello. So were artists Johnson & Hemming African Americans?

If these images were a set—perhaps preserved in a single collection of personal papers—that relationship could provide clues to the identities of both sitters and artists. Instead, they are gathered here for the first time in the hope of generating clues and, with them, more images and information. Such display has already brought them this far.

Article continues in the 2009 printed issue…

The Piedmont Intelligencer (Thomas & DuPre): The Short Life and Long Legacy of a Sprightly Newspaper

By: Antoinette W. Roades

As the first issues of The Piedmont Intelligencer arrived in the offices of editors around Virginia, reviews of Charlottesville’s newest newspaper quickly tumbled into print.  “The Intelligencer,” said The Richmond Dispatch, “has a show of enterprise and life that speaks well for the capabilities of its conductors.” The Staunton Spectator took a similar view. “The first issue displays a degree of industry which gives assurance that the paper will deserve support. We wish it abundant success.”  Staunton’s Valley Virginian detected an additional quality in its new colleague. The Intelligencer was no less than “a sprightly weekly” in its opinion.  The Culpeper Observer agreed and then some:  “This is one of the sprightliest papers on our exchange list. We consider it one of the very best Family Papers in the State. It is the only thing that has ever caused our better half and ourself to disagree. She claims the right to read it first. If such a paper does not succeed, the community in which it is published have [sic] poor taste. It is published in Charlottesville, Va.”

Article continues in the 2009 printed issue….

Consider the Coffee Tree: A Plant with Provenance

By: Peggy Cornett

The big tree that so long presided over Thomas Jefferson’s vegetable garden from the edge of Mulberry Row regularly puzzled even knowledgeable visitors to Monticello. In leaf, it looked rather like a locust—a good and worthy local tree. So it also looked a bit like an Ailanthus—an invasive alien species against which local foresters wage war. Then there were the strange, stiff, leathery pods that littered nearby ground (every other year anyway). So was it native or import, friend or foe, treasure or trash?

In fact, Monticello’s specimen Kentucky coffee tree was—like others that make cameo appearances in Charlottesville and Albemarle County private yards, public gardens, and woodsy patches—an historical amalgam. The mountaintop tree most certainly descended from seed or seedlings Jefferson imported from points west. Most in the area would share that origin. But at least a few could have descended from Virginia’s rare indigenous stock. Whatever their individual ancestry, however, all local coffee trees attest an early interest in their forbears for qualities both aesthetic and practical by everyone from Native Americans and frontier woodsmen to notable planters both here and abroad. Given such provenance, every Charlottesville and Albemarle Gymnocladus dioica (the tree’s botanical name) could be considered a living artifact—at once friend, treasure, conversation piece, and maker of beautiful shade.

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Milton LaTour Grigg FAIA: From Martinis to Monticello--Our Last Gentleman Architect

By: W. Douglas Gilpin, Jr. FAIA

I first met Milton Grigg in the fall of 1971 when I interviewed for employment the following summer.  His business partner Hank Browne [Henry J. Browne AIA] introduced him to me noting that Grigg and other prominent architects had recently succeeded in stopping a major addition to the U.S. Capitol’s center section that would have erased the last true facade of the original 1819 structure.  I was, of course, impressed.  I interned for the firm in 1974 and ‘75 and was hired as a full time employee in June 1976.  On my first day, Grigg welcomed me with, “Now that college has taught you everything about architecture and philosophy, we hope to teach you humility.”  By that, I was even more impressed. 

That was the way he was.  He was one of the last true gentlemen architects.  A Southerner with good manners, old fashioned diction, and an accent like honey—from him, cherry became “CHUH-reh” and contractor became “cun-TRAC-tuh”—he was also a Great Depression survivor for whom frugality was a way of life.  A man generous with his time and genuinely interested in his staff both in and outside the office, he was also a practitioner who expected employees to meet the same high standards he set for himself.  If he presented any contradictions, however, they dissolved nicely when he constructed his excellent Beefeater Gin martini for a guest.

Article continues in the 2009 printed issue…

The McIntire Ash: A Tribute

By: Antoinette W. Roades

    Trees are often called silent witnesses, yet they comment profoundly in matters of perspective. We do not know who planted the white ash that has towered over the McIntire Building throughout modern memory. A 1928 photograph shows it already rising well above the then-new library. So it likely began its long life when the earlier structure on the corner of Second and East Jefferson streets was home to Dr. W.C.N. Randolph (1834-1907), a great grandson of Thomas Jefferson, and his second wife, Mary McIntire (1855-1937), sister of Paul Goodloe McIntire. Parades, picnics, protests the McIntire ash has overseen a spectrum of events and the changes they attest. It has also supervised considerable putting up and pulling down in the neighborhood it surveys. Meanwhile, it has met challenges of its own notably drought, storm damage, and the indignity of being pruned awkwardly to prevent it from accidentally damaging the buildings that have encroached on it. In 2004, Virginia Tech forestry professor Jeffrey Kirwan and writer-educator Nancy Ross Hugo set out to record such specimens.
    Article continues in the 2008 printed issue….

"The Neighborhood in Which I Afterward Lived and Married so Happily"

By: Antoinette W. Roades

    Remembering the winter he spent in camps in or near Albemarle County and the call-paying and churchgoing that were part of that welcome respite from war, Wilbur Fisk Davis notes one excursion as “my first visit to the neighborhood in which I afterwards lived and married so happily.”
    Indeed, the Cismont sites he mentions were the very same ones that framed his landscape when he taught school in Albemarle between 1866 and 1869. Through his 1866 marriage to Ella Virginia Sampson, those sites and the families connected with them would become connected to him for life. It has been noted (including in Magazine of Albemarle County History of 2007 and 1986) that Ella Sampson’s family home was Clifton. And letters written by one of her sisters in the late 1860s bear that dateline. But the reference may confuse because the Sampsons never owned the only Clifton most Albemarle residents recognize - that is, the house built by Gov. Thomas Mann Randolph in the early nineteenth century overlooking the Rivanna River above Milton. Instead, deeds, maps, the Census, etc., locate the Sampsons several miles east of Bowlesville (later Cismont). In modern memory, the house there has been called The Oaks.
    Article continues in the 2008 printed issue….

"Recollections of My Life - Especially During the War 1861 - For My Children" Part II

By: by Wilbur Fisk Davis. Edited with an introduction by R.E. Lee Scouten

    At the outset of the Civil War and as described in Part I of this narrative Wilbur Fisk Davis (1839-1912) was living in Charlottesville with his parents. He had been a University of Virginia student. His father, Rev. Joseph Hoomes Davis, was a Methodist minister. The family resided in the Methodist parsonage, the predecessor to the ca. 1891 Methodist Presiding Elder’s House that still stands at 401 Ridge Street. In that earlier portion of his memoir, Wilbur Davis mentions many local names those of fellow students, neighbors, and fellow soldiers. In Part II, there are fewer mentions of local people and landmarks as Carrington’s Charlottesville Artillery advances out of the central Piedmont and into Pennsylvania. It is important to remember, however, that despite the shift of scene and characters, Davis’ experiences are the same as those of many other Albemarle County and Charlottesville men who served in the Army of Northern Virginia. As Part II of Wilbur Davis’ memoir opens, it is April 1863, and he and his unit have just broken camp from winter quarters and are preparing for the fight ahead. In a straightforward, unembellished style, Davis notes events and places as he passes through them and also observes people well-known and unknown alike. Given the economy of his style, someone unfamiliar with the battles he describes might conclude that Carrington’s Artillery plays a relatively minor role. That conclusion would be incorrect.
    Article continues in the 2008 printed issue….

Photographed by W.P. Rhodes: A Case of Double Exposure

By: Antoinette W. Roades

    The fact that multiple William Roads/Rhodes/Rodes, et al., lived in Albemarle County in the second half of the nineteenth century has occasionally caused confusion. The fact that one of them, William Perry Rhodes, was a photographer who made images on Main Street in Charlottesville has often caused confusion of him with Main Street photographer William Roads (1824-1890). In addition to name and address, the two artists even shared descent from German-speaking Mennonite immigrants to the Shenandoah Valley. Yet no evidence has surfaced that they were kinsmen or otherwise associated.
    William Perry Rhodes was born in Rockingham County in October 1853 to Magdalene Heatwole and Frederick A. Rhodes, a farmer. Histories of the Valley’s Mennonites describe the family as descended from Anthony Roth, a mid eighteenth century immigrant from Wurttemberg, Germany. William Rhodes appears to have begun his photographic career near home, possibly in Bridgewater where he is known to have worked.
    Article continues in the 2008 printed issue….

Photographed by William Roads: A Portrait of the Artist Through the Lens of His Work

By: Antoinette W. Roades

    On May 7, 1867, readers of The Charlottesville Chronicle found the latest advertisement from photographer William Roads in their newspapers. Under the headline SOMETING [sic] NEW, he announced no less than “splendid” exterior and interior views of the University of Virginia and also offered to take views of residences. “Call and examine specimens,” he invited. Six months later, on November 9, Chronicle readers found another Roads advertisement that expanded on the theme of the earlier one. He could offer views, groups, “or any kind of outdoor work” because he had “a splendid View Camera, an instrument made expressly for such work.”
    Both ads were small and undistinguished. “Something New” was an often-used headline, although “Something” was usually spelled correctly. Either might have been easily overlooked at the time. From a modern perspective, however, the little ads stand out because they are clues to when two images were made. Those were also small and undistinguished. But because their subject was Monticello, and because they bid fair to be the earliest photographs ever taken of Thomas Jefferson’s home, they are historical documents of importance. In turn, because both images bear backstamps that identify them as the work of William Roads, they make him a person of importance, one who achieved something deserving of modern recognition.
    Article continues in the 2008 printed issue….

Charlottesville Skyscrapers, 1919-1929: Ego, Imagination, and Electricity in a Historic Landscape

By: Daniel Bluestone

    Skyscrapers dramatically transformed Charlottesville’s architectural and urban landscape between 1919 and 1929. In that decade, the National Bank Building on East Main Street, the Monticello Hotel facing Court Square, and the Altamont Apartments on Altamont Circle overtopped local church steeples and gave Charlottesville a strikingly modern skyline. These buildings tripled and quadruples the two- and three-story streetscape that had defined the downtown since the mid nineteenth century. Charlottesville’s skyscrapers drew upon building technologies including steel frame and curtain wall construction and elevator transport that had facilitated skyscraper development in larger American cities like Chicago, New York, and Richmond since the 1880s.
    Article continues in the 2008 printed issue….