University of Virginia History and My Heart Attack

This is the speech about the history of Carr's Hill that I delicered while I was experiencing a myocardial infarction. If you take a look at it you will see that it is too long to deliver even a small portion of it. As I was extemporizing, I probably only used one-hundredth of what is basically a summary of the entire book I wrote about the damn house.  It was a stressful experience to say the least. 

Virginia Garden Club Board

Lunch

October 13, 2010

Carr’s Hill Through Time

• Thank you, Garden Club of Virginia, for inviting me to speak to you today. It’s so nice to be back at Carr’s Hill. Because I am not a plantsman and you all are, I am not going to talk about the gardens here. Instead I will be talking mostly about the humans who grew in and around Carr’s Hill.

• The UVa history I have learned has come from several experiences: six years in President Casteen’s office; one year researching and writing the Carr’s Hill history; one year interviewing Professor Emeritus Ernest Mead; and one year doing research for my  current writing project--a novel about the University of Virginia during three days of May, 1856.

• At this point in my writing life, I am particularly interested in examining how the sweep of history affects life in small communities.  

So, I kind of like to start at the beginning of the Carr’s Hill story:

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• Even 17,000 years ago, there probably were no fixed settlements near Carr’s Hill.
• It wasn’t until about 3,000 years ago on what's known today as Morven Farm that human beings--probably the Monocan people, first put their imprint on the landscape. Later still, we are not sure exactly when, there was a Monocan settlement along the Rivanna River near Wal Mart.
• In 1735 Abraham Lewis secured 800 acres in an area that currently includes the University of Virginia grounds, and Nicholas Meriwether secured 1,020 acres in the eastern portion of contemporary Charlottesville (in addition to a much larger tract of land to the east of the Southwest Mountains).
• The city of Charlottesville was chartered in 1764 along the trade route of Three Notch’d Road, now Main Street, University Ave, Ivy Road, and the rest of Route 250. This is the time period of very noticeable settlement of European and African originated peoples.
• Now let’s get the google map in our brains to narrow in on the little hill on which we sit today.
• Before the University acquired this hill, the written history about the place is sketchy.
• We do know that in 1803, a farmer named James Burnley  died debt-ridden and left the the 80 acres of the hill to his daughter, Mary.
• Mary Burnley married Daniel Piper, who probably farmed the 80 acres, and then subdivided the land, and in 1829 sold the 43 acres of upland bordering what was Three Notch’d Road to the University of Virginia proctor, Arthur S. Brockenbrough, for $1,065.62.
• Mr. Brockenbrough, who had been hired in 1819 to oversee the construction of Mr. Jefferson’s plan for the University, died in 1832.  
• When he died he left the 43 acres to his wife Lucy Brockenbrough.  This legacy would become her living.
• At time of this inheritance all 109 student rooms at the U. were occupied. Rooming houses were necessary for students and a financial boon for the unmarried women who owned and ran them.
• (Rooming houses were one of the few respectable businesses women without husbands could run in those days. In fact, Dolly Madison’s mother ran a boarding house in Philadelphia for a year, after her husband, John Payne died. Formerly a planter in NC, he emancipated his slaves in 1783 and moved to Philadelphia to start a business venture that failed.)
• In 1833, on what was then known as “Brockenbrough’s Hill,” Mrs. Brockenbrough opened one of the earliest student boarding houses in the vicinity.
• Kept it open until 1849
• Housed 12 students, five white children and 15 enslaved persons.
• In their archaeological report to the University, Rivanna Archaeological Services notes that this large number of enslaved workers might "represent labor that was leased to the University on an annual basis, or it might also suggest that some type of agriculture supplementing the boarding house income, was also practiced in the bottom lands along Meadow Creek."
• Mrs. Brockenbrough operated the boarding house until her death in the middle of the century. Then in 1849, as a result of a lawsuit first brought in 1822 by a creditor of Mr. Burnley, it was sold to Maximillian Schele de Vere, a professor of modern languages at the University, for $2,370, an amount that was to cover all the debts against the Burnley estate.
• Three years later, Mr. Schele de Vere sold Brockenbrough Hill for $4,460 to Thomas Jefferson Randolph, University rector and grandson of Thomas Jefferson. Brockenbrough Hill became Carr's Hill in 1854, when Mr. Randolph sold the property to Mrs. Dabney S. Carr for his own purchase price. According to a notation he made during the course of the sale, Mrs. Carr was already living on Carr's Hill when she bought it from him. She may have been renting a house as a residence for herself, or she may have been operating one as a boarding house for Mr. Randolph and/or for Mr. Schele de Vere. After the sale she continued the student-boarding trade on the hill.
• The boarding houses proved to be more popular with students than did the original "dormitories" of the academical village. This preference for boarding houses had something to do with the University's growing population. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the University's enrollment stood at 645, third highest in the nation, exceeded only by Harvard and Yale. The allure of Carr's Hill, however, must have also had something to do with Mr. Jefferson's most vaunted value, freedom – and perhaps the quality of the food. So popular was this early off-Grounds housing that one of the University's early historians reported that Mrs. Carr sometimes had "as many as 50 young men seated in her comfortable dining room."
• POINT TO BLUE COTTAGE PHOTO: I can’t imagine how 50 men could have been seated in this small house, so maybe this was not Mrs. Carr’s boarding house.  Legend has it that it was.

• Also on Carr’s Hill around this time was the tiny cottage named Buckingham Palace, which is the oldest structure currently on Carr’s Hill. William Pratt, the University's superintendent of buildings and grounds, designed the house and built it for a Culpeper judge named Field. It seems that it was meant to house Judge Field's son, William, and William's roommate, Philip Jones. They were both students in 1857-59, and Mr. Field was also a student for the two following years, 1859-61. The story goes that as the Civil War approached both men found themselves in love with Miss Betty Morris. The friends pledged that should one of them be killed, the other would marry Betty and name their first born son for the fallen friend. Field was killed at the battle of Mulvern Hill. Jones lived to return to the University, marry Betty, and live with her in Buckingham Palace until he completed his studies. They named their first son William Field. A 1962 letter in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library asserts that the "house was built under a standing arrangement the Board of Visitors had concerning the construction of such houses for the sons of wealthy parents, and was, so far as I know, the only such one built."
• Carr's Hill was also the location of a prewar raising of the Rebel flag, political theater reminiscent of protests during a later era in United States history. One day, a group of University students hoisted a Confederate flag atop the Rotunda. The excitement of that act of rebellion led authorities to cancel classes. The chairman of the faculty told the students that they would not be prosecuted for their small uprising if they took away the flag. It was removed to Carr's Hill, where, for a time, it flew from a ramshackle boarding house.
• During the war, student enrollment fell drastically at the University. Not many men were left on Grounds: in 1862, there were only forty-six students and a few old professors. Also present were a number of doctors, who served in the hospital set up in the Rotunda after the first battle of Manassas, and later in the buildings of Dawson's Row and in some Range rooms, caring for sick and wounded Confederate soldiers, one thousand of whom are buried in the University's graveyard. The war raged around Virginia, but Charlottesville and the University were largely spared devastation.
• On March 3, 1865, having defeated Confederate troops at Waynesboro, General Philip Henry Sheridan was said to be marching on Charlottesville. Fearing that his troops would ravage the University of Virginia as Union troops had done at the Virginia Military Institute, a University delegation prepared to do what had to be done to ensure the safety of the school. The University rector, Colonel Thomas L. Preston, together with the chairman of the faculty, Socrates Maupin, and John B. Minor, a professor of law, met General Sheridan's advance guard, led by General George Armstrong Custer. Mr. Minor waved a white handkerchief attached to his walking stick. General Custer greeted them peaceably and he posted a guard outside the University to protect the Grounds while his troops were encamped on Carr’s Hill.
• At the beginning and throughout the war, students used Carr’s Hill for military drills.  Also before and then after the war, Carr’s Hill was also used by students as an area for recreation.
• So over the years, small gymnasiums were placed at various points on Grounds, including on Carr's Hill. Sheltered by trees, they consisted of "clusters of horizontal and parallel bars, swings, and poles." These early gymnastic facilities prefigured Levering Hall, an addition to Hotel F, which dates to 1857, and Fayerweather Gymnasium, built on Carr's Hill in 1893. Also on Carr's Hill, students played baseball and basketball, while the social club, Hot Feet, performed plays, and students soon to be soldiers mustered for battle practice.

• During and after the war, Carr's Hill continued to change hands, but not names. In 1863, Mrs. Carr sold Carr's Hill to Addison Maupin for $30,000, seemingly 25 thousand more than she bought it for, but probably in Confederate dollars, which would explain the price inflation. At the time, Mr. Maupin was the manager of the University's dining halls and brother to Socrates Maupin, the chairman of faculty for the University, the administrative officer whose duties most closely resembled that of a university president.
• Mr. Maupin kept the property until July 1, 1867, when he sold it to the University for $10,000, with real money this time, I suspect. The Board of Visitors at that point considered the property "indispensable to the University's purposes." As a holding action, Board of Visitors minutes of June 29, 1871, indicate that Carr's Hill was purchased "to prevent the occupation of the grounds by objectionable tenants."
• The objectionable tenants were probably black workers, formerly enslaved in Charlottesville and in the surrounding Albemarle County. Suddenly homeless, they began to camp on Carr’s Hill after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and in greater number after Lee’s surrender at Appomatax Court House in 1865.
• Thirty years or so later, the Stanford White Buildings at the bottom of the Lawn--Cocke, Rousse, and Cabell, obscured the view of the Southern Mountains that Jefferson had wanted for the University.  The buildings also obscured a settlement, known for many years as “Canada” on account of all the free people of color who lived there.  Some of the discussion about whether to block Mr. Jefferson’s intended view of the southern mountains, revolved around the recommendation to close off the view of the unsightly settlement across the street from the Lawn.  Later, the University bought some of “Canada,” Kitty Foster’s home and a few other’s owned by her family and the grave yard in which she was buried.  The grave yard was later discovered--1990’s--when the parking lot that covered it up was under construction.
• In 1867, during its first year of University ownership, the rustic, two-story frame-built Blue Cottage, which was located a bit farther down the hill than is the president’s house caught fire.  
• It seems to have been the first Carr's Hill structure to be photographed (built circa 1837), if not the first to be built. Because of the press of a growing student body, the University had to reconstruct Blue Cottage and then build a new set of dormitories.
• The dormitories were made out of brick and contained thirty-two rooms.
• So, in 1871, Carr's Hill became officially one of the University's holdings, and student housing on the hill, the University's responsibility.
• AFTER THE WAR
• After the war, while the strict architectural control that Thomas Jefferson had exercised in building the University held in the original academical village, more and more trees were being cut down on Carr’s Hill, and one homely building after another sprouted out of the ground. The buildings, especially the dormitories, were heavily used but poorly maintained. In a report to the faculty of 1886, the proctor noted, "This entire range of buildings is in very bad condition. The roof is of shingles and leaks badly – the dormitories on the ground floor are low and damp. Twelve of them are unoccupied and uninhabitable and will so remain, unless something is done to better their condition. There is no gas, no running water, and less of the convenience and essentials to healthful living than on any part of the University grounds."
• One year later, gas and water lines were added, and, in 1888, latrines were installed. That same year, the Board of Visitors funded the construction of a dining hall on Carr's Hill. Unfortunately, these additions were too little, too late. The dormitories continued to deteriorate.Carr's Hill dormitories proved to be too decrepit to keep.
• Especially meaningful to the history of the University was a problem on the hill not recognized until the fire that devastated the Rotunda in 1895: low water pressure, which affected the dormitories in a minor way, but proved to be disastrous when fire fighters attempted to pump water to quench that fire.
• A water tank for drinking and for fire safety was installed on Carr's Hill in 1895, right after the fire. Still, even with these improvements, the University continued to lose money by rooming and boarding students on Carr's Hill. So, on May 1, 1905, its dormitories closed down. Visitors to Carr's Hill can still see a remnant of those dormitories. Although the major section of the L-shaped dormitory was destroyed when the president's house was built, there remains today a two-story brick house behind the herb garden, which has proved very livable to generations of presidents' guests.
• While these students could carouse, some among them could meditate on questions larger than how many servings a keg of beer contains. Two former residents of Buckingham Palace left behind poetic scratchings on its windows. Incised on one window was this melancholy message: "W. C. Latimer, Bittou, S.C., Jan. 20, 1903, a rainy, snowy day." Nearly thirty years later, another student inscribed a more philosophically explicit message:

From this window, pensive I have seen

What I was and what I might have been.

The past and future dim, like yonder mount

And life is such a brief, uncertain fount.

-John Sherwood Widdicomb [1930]

• Between 1880 and 1900, the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity used Buckingham Palace as a meeting house. During this time, it was known as the Delta Kappa Epsilon Cottage. As the University's first fraternity, its activities would not be unfamiliar to contemporary Rugby Road residents. James Southall, an early member of the chapter, reminisced, "When I was in college not a single fraternity house was then in existence, the nearest thing being the little one-story cottage on Carr's Hill where the Dekes used to hold their Saturday meetings, and munch cheese and crackers washed down their gullets by potations of beer and claret.

• After the Rotunda fire in 1895 the University met the great Stanford White of the firm, McKim, Mead, and White.  White was hired to rebuild the fire-gutted Rotunda. And rebuilt it he did.  There emerged from the shell of Mr. Jefferson’s Rotunda a gorgeous Gilded Age revision, which was largely replaced in the seventies by a Jeffersonian inspired restoration.  Still, Stanford White’s beaux arts style is very much in evidence from Carr’s Hill.  From here, we can see his magnificent North Entrance to the Rotunda.
• But in the beginning of the 20th Century, Carr’s Hill was null and void.  Then, like God, William A. Lambeth, who served the University as professor of medicine, chairman of the Department of Physical Education and superintendent of buildings and grounds, began planning a suitable house for the University’s first president. He was serving as construction manager of the hospital expansion when he took on the construction of the Carr's Hill mansion.
• In March of 1906, Dr. Lambeth had a roster of six firms he asked to develop proposals based on a detailed description of the requirements of the house. But on May 1, 1906, Mr. Alderman wrote McKim, Mead & White a letter of inquiry, and Stanford White was chosen as architect for the president's house and a new refectory.
• Work on the house began with the terracing of Carr's Hill in 1907. In the course of construction, most of the dormitory buildings on Carr's Hill were demolished, except for part of the old L-shaped dormitory, originally servants' quarters and now the Carr's Hill guest house; part of the refectory, now used as an office; and the venerable Buckingham Palace, also today used as guest quarters. In 1908, the carriage house (the president's garage) was completed, possibly with wood and brick from the torn-down structures on the hill.
• In 1909, the house itself was finished. The total cost of construction was $28,837.
• The house as it is today owes as much to the persistence of the University’s first president, Edwin Alderman and his wife, Bessie Alderman, in seeing that their vision was realized as it does to the professionals who planned and built it. For twenty-six years, it served the Aldermans well, and for a hundred, the University. From the beginning, it was agreed that the house was a success. William Lambeth, ratifying the idea that McKim, Mead & White might improve on Jefferson, said of it: "The President's House resulted from an effort of Stanford White to give the University an example of a lighter, more airy type of classic form than any left by Mr. Jefferson. Jefferson's types, from the beginning were romanized. Weight, predominating, gave nobility and dignity. The President's House is more graceful than dignified, more beautiful than noble, yet the structure breathes both nobility and dignity."
• The President's House, a conscious attempt to represent physically the preeminence of the office of university president, remains representative of the new era of university history begun with the creation of the presidential administrative structure in 1904.
• Because of Mr. Alderman’s poor health and the rigors of executive office, he and Mrs. Alderman did not use Carr’s Hill the way they had planned. It became a refuge from his job rather than an extension of it. There he worked in the study at the back of the house. Joseph Vaughan tells the story of a former Board of Visitors member, William Potter, who went up to Carr’s Hill when he was a student to intercede for a friend recently suspended from the University: "When Alderman came into the hallway, he greeted Potter warmly and asked, ‘Mr. Potter, is this a social visit or a matter of business?’ Potter said, ‘I’ve come to talk about a student friend of mine.’ Alderman replied, ‘Mr. Potter, that sounds like business, and I attend to business in my office, never in my home.’ Escorting Potter to the door, Alderman said, ‘Good day, sir; please make an appointment.’"
• In Buckingham Palace, Edwin Anderson Alderman, Jr., lived alongside his parents during his time at the University, from 1923 to 1929. The quiet of the house must have been punctuated by occasional voices of students and noise of the farm at the north end of the hill.
• Although beset by physical problems, President Alderman remained in office until his death in 1931. In 1917, he saw University students training on the Grounds and then marching off to battle. More than 2,500 students and alumni, and 26 members of the faculty fought in the Great War. Eighty were killed.
• When he died on April 29, 1931, the University was thriving and brimming with life.
• After Mr. Alderman’s death and the election of John Lloyd Newcomb as interim president, Mr. Newcomb, ever unassuming, did not move into Carr’s Hill. Instead, Mrs. Alderman stayed on in the house until builders completed her new home. This admirably proportioned house is located near the intersection of Rugby Road with Preston Avenue. It was a fitting residence, she thought, for the widow of the University’s first president.dwin Alderman and his wife, Bessie, sought a hard-working house to accommodate all the public events they anticipated, a house offering public spaces on the first floor and private living space on the second. It would function not unlike the professors' pavilions that lined the Lawn.
• Two and a half years later, in June of 1933, after the Board of Visitors had offered the presidency to several candidates, who turned it down, and after faculty and student resolutions in favor of his election, the board finally elected John Lloyd Newcomb president. Soon after his inauguration, he asked future University president Colgate Darden to serve as his advisor, a position in which Mr. Darden served during most of Mr. Newcomb’s administration.
• The serene domestic life in the president’s house was made even more pleasant by Grace Russell Newcomb’s musicianship; she was a talented pianist and played music with friends at Carr’s Hill. Occasionally the Newcombs did entertain guests, with luncheons for members of the Board of Visitors and gatherings before football games. They also entertained each entering class at the beginning of the school year and the graduating class at its end.
• Colgate Darden worked hard at the University, but he also saw the presidency as an opportunity for his family to be reunited after years of the travel required by his governorship. In 1947, when he moved into Carr’s Hill with his wife Constance du Pont Darden and his children Colgate, Pierre, and Irene, he was satisfied that with the move he would get his family “back into a position where we were together.” Tragically, in the fall of 1959, soon after Mr. Darden stepped down from office, Pierre died at sea while sailing.
• Mr. Darden began to garden around this house seriously, and with the garden clubIn 1948, The Garden Club of Virginia offered to restore the Pavilion Gardens. Alden Hopkins, Landscape Architect for Williamsburg, was chosen as landscape architect. Hopkins drew plans for the gardens and supervised the restoration of the West Gardens. After Hopkins's death, Donald H. Parker, his assistant, finished the work in the East Gardens. The West and the East Gardens are quite different from one another in part because there were two designers. The topography also plays a large role as the West Gardens are relatively flat while the East Gardens are terraced into the hillside. The West Gardens were dedicated in 1952 and the East Gardens in 1964. The Garden Club of Virginia continues to guide the care and maintenance of the gardens.
• "Necessary houses" or "privies" were also reconstructed in six of the gardens and now serve as garden sheds. In the East Gardens, where they are not reconstructed, the foundations are outlined in brick. The gardens are each numbered in accordance with the corresponding pavilions.
• Six gardens are divided in half by serpentine walls. The upper gardens are called Pavilion Gardens and are more formal and contemplative. The lower gardens are called Hotel Gardens as they correspond to the former dining halls on the range, called hotels, and are interpreted as utilitarian gardens and orchards for kitchen use.
• Mr. Shannon took office on October 6, 1959, at age forty, moving into Carr’s Hill with his wife, Eleanor, and two young children. In March of 1960, the president’s family, consisting of Edgar and Eleanor Shannon and their first two daughters, three-year-old Eleanor and fifteen-month-old Elizabeth (Bess), moved into the president’s residence.
• The house had been unoccupied since Colgate and Constance Darden moved out seven months earlier. During the months it lay empty, Carr’s Hill received its first major renovation, new plumbing, a new kitchen, and redecorating that Mrs. Shannon designed with the help of Frederick Nichols, then associate professor of architecture.
• Buckingham Palace was used as a playhouse for their five daughters. Today Buckingham Palace is used as a guest cottage.
• Frank and Ann Hereford were the first residents to use the house as a resource for University development. In regard to fundraising in Charlottesville, Mr. Hereford said, “Of course we did a lot of things here. We did a lot of entertaining, whenever we had football games and basketball games, we would have alumni who we thought were capable of making significant gifts, back here for weekends.”
• Robert and Karen O’Neill with their four children moved into Carr’s Hill in August of 1985.  (Mrs. O’Neill says that the children were thrilled because it was the only time in their lives that they had their own private bathrooms.)
• Over their five years at Carr’s Hill they used the house for much University business, and hosted many distinguished visitors, including Justices Rehnquist, Burger, Brennan, Powell, and Scalia; and President’s Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton.
• Mr. Casteen calls the business use of the president’s house “the function of the official residence.” He moved into the house in 1990 with his former wife Lotta Lofgren and their two children, Elizabeth and Lars.
• As a place of residence and as a place for University business, President Casteen says, “I like the house very well. McKim, Mead & White had a feel for what makes a house comfortable. In Carr’s Hill, they created spaces far more livable for families than the rooms in Mr. Jefferson’s pavilions.” It also is the place for family occasions both great and small.
• In 2003, Mr. Casteen married Elizabeth Taylor Foote. Theirs was the first wedding of a University president to take place in the president’s house.  During the Casteen administration, the house has been frequently used as a place of public gathering. In 2006–2007, 13,224 guests attended 104 events at Carr’s Hill, while overnight guests stayed at Carr’s Hill a total of 63 nights.
• President Sullivan’s time in the house began this past July, but already, with her husband law professor, Douglas Laycock, is busy hosting University visitors to what President Casteen called the University president’s official residence.”Since President Sullivan has taken office (from August 2nd to October 7th), President Sullivan has held 21 events at Carr’s Hill. Approximately 4,750 guests have come through the doors during this time span. The types of events have ranged from small dinners to large scale receptions. The largest and most notable reception was the: Welcome reception for all 1st years. All members of the incoming class were invited to come up to Carr’s Hill to meet the President immediately after the Opening Convocation Ceremony on Opening Weekend. I can attest to the impressiveness of such events for which hundreds and hundreds of students visit Carr’s Hill. Quite an amazing sight.
• Although the schedule is not yet finalized, Stacy Smith guesses that Carr’s Hill will be the location of b/w 20-30 more events before the end of this semester alone.
• Part of its impression involves its service as a symbol as well as a place for living and gathering. In 2007, Carr's Hill was placed on the Virginia Landmarks Register and was subsequently nominated to be included in the National Register of Historic Places. It retains the essential historic character of the design by McKim, Mead & White, and its integrity is highly intact. To be symbolic and functional is a heavy burden on a house, not least because through time cultural alterations change a symbol's associations and a house's purpose. It is a tribute to Carr's Hill that in these past one hundred years, it has stood up brilliantly to such change.