Mr. Jefferson’s Telescope
Mr. Jefferson’s Telescope
A HISTORY OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA IN
100
OBJECTS
Brendan Wolfe
University of Virginia Press
Charlottesville & London
UNIVERSITY of VIRGINIA PRESS
© 2017 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper
First published 2017
987654321
Library of Congress Cataloging-­in‑Publication Data
CIP to come
Cover art: [cover art caption]
Throughout every stage of the first one hundred years of its
“
existence, the University of Virginia has never swerved in loyalty
to the wise teachings of the Fathers of the Republic.
”
—P HI L I P A L E X A NDE R B R U CE , History of the University of Virginia, 1922
One [student], clad only in a Batman’s cape, sprinted across
“
the Lawn, while another raced through Alderman Library wearing a motorcycle helmet and nothing else.
”
—V I R GI NI U S DA B NE Y, Mr. Jefferson’s University, 1981
Preface
Contents
000
1 · Jefferson’s Telescope
000
2 · Whalebone and Ivory Walking Stick
000
000
3 · Plans for the Academical Village
4 · Early Tools
000
5 · South Elevation of the Rotunda
000
6 · Pavilion VII
000
7 · First Minutes of the Board of Visitors
000
8 · Bust of Lafayette
000
9 · Dunglison Chalice
000
10 · Jefferson’s Hair
000
11 · Poe’s Library Fine
000
12 · A Voyage to the Moon
000
13 · The Crackerbox
000
14 · Photograph of Sally Cottrell Cole
000
15 · Sidereal Clock
000
16 · Bookcase in Pavilion VII
000
17 · Rotunda Chemical Furnace
000
18 · The Student
000
19 · Letter from Robert Lewis Dabney to His
Brother
000
000
20 · William Barton Rogers’s Cabinet
21 · Washington Society Medal
000
22 · Student Sketch of
Maximilian Schele De Vere
000
000
23 · Varsity Hall
24 · Bohn’s Album
000
25 · Civil War Trepanning Kit
000
26 · John B. Minor’s Diary
000
000
27 · Samuel Miller’s Chair
28 · The University Memorial
000
29 · Brooks Hall Mammoth
000
30 · McGuffey’s Fourth Eclectic Reader
000
31 · First Edition of Corks and Curls
000
32 · Silk Handkerchief
000
33 · Graduation Invitation
000
34 · Pass Certificate of Caroline Preston Davis 000
35 · Key to the Rotunda
000
36 · Bust of John B. Minor
000
37 · Holsinger Photograph of the
Rotunda Fire
000
38 · Fragment of Original Capital of
the Rotunda
000
39 · Original Piece of Tin Roof with Painting 000
40 · Cast Plaster Rosette from
000
Stanford White Renovation
41 · Rouss Hall Floor Joist, Bracket, and Nails 000
42 · Wooden Doll
000
43 · Rotunda Cigar Box
000
44 · Consent Form from Walter Reed’s
Yellow Fever Experiment
000
45 · Cast of John Powell’s Hand
000
46 · Knife of “The Honor Men” Poet
000
47 · Garrett Hall Ceiling
000
48 · Loving Cup
000
49 · Track Medal
000
50 · Hot Foot Crown
000
51 · Cartoon from the First Class Reunion
000
52 · Buck Mayer on the Cover of Sporting Life 000
53 · Strip from James R. McConnell’s
Crashed Plane
000
000
54 · History of the University of Virginia
55 · Raven Society Bid Card
000
56 · Model of Grounds
000
57 · Pavilion VI Frescoes
000
000
58 · Merton Spire
59 · The Eleusis of Chi Omega
000
60 · Mountain Lake Herbarium Collection
000
61 · Letter from Alice Jackson to
Board of Visitors
000
62 · John Lloyd Newcomb’s Tea Service
000
63 · Nursing Cape
000
64 · Alumni News article on the “Hand
That Held the Dagger” Speech
000
65 · Photograph of Caroyl Beddow Gooch 000
66 · “The Gift Outright” by Robert Frost
000
67 · Parachute Wedding Dress
000
68 · John Cook Wyllie’s Japanese Radio Set 000
69 · Edward Stettinius’s Gas Mask
000
70 · Ed Roseberry’s Ciro-­Flex Camera
000
71 · Pavilion Gardens
000
72 · Bowie Kuhn’s Student ID Card
000
73 · Walter Ridley’s Scrapbook
000
74 · Everard Meade’s Cannon
000
75 · Cross Burned in
Sarah-­Patton Boyle’s Yard
000
76 · Carroll’s Tea Room Menu
000
77 · Faulkner’s Typewriter
000
78 · Coffee Carafe
000
79 · Mama Rotunda’s Outfit
000
80 · Bice Device
000
81 · Control Panel from the University’s
000
First Computer
000
82 · University Mace
83 · Edgar Shannon’s Blue and
000
Orange Phone
84 · The Sally Hemings Underground
Newsletter
000
000
85 · Coeducation Lawsuit
86 · First Women’s NCAA Championship
000
87 · Homer Statue
000
88 · The Last Easters T‑Shirt
000
000
89 · Peach Bowl Coke Bottles
90 · International Center Egyptian Plate
000
91 · Steve Keene Paintings for WTJU
000
92 · Bernard Mayes’s March on
Washington Flag
000
93 · Abercrombie & Fitch Catalog
000
94 · University of Virginia Barbie
95 · Kitty Foster Memorial
96 · Shoe from Sullivan Controversy
97 · The Student’s Progress
98 · ACC Basketball Tournament Net
99 · Post-­It Notes from Rolling Stone
Controversy
100 · Cav Man
000
000
000
000
000
Illustration Credits
000
000
000
x
M
r. Jefferson’s Telescope is a cabinet of
curiosities. Open it anywhere and you’ll
discover an object, which is to say a story, and a
part of the history of the University of Virginia.
For instance, an orange and blue silk handkerchief (p. 000) helps explain from whence the
school colors come. It also points us back to
the Civil War—the colors had previously been
cardinal and gray, calling to mind a blood-­
stained Confederate uniform. The University is
a living monument, with the present and the
past woven together in enlightening ways.
Preface
Flip ahead a few pages and you’ll meet
Caroline Preston Davis, represented by her
pass certificate from 1893 (p. 000). The first
woman to complete an academic course at
the University, Davis was the granddaughter of
John A. G. Davis, a professor of law murdered
outside Pavilion X in 1840 (p. 000), and a relative of Colonel Staige Davis Blackford (p. 000),
who commanded the University-­run Eighth
Evacuation Hospital during World War II. Blackford’s namesake son later edited the Virginia
Quarterly Review (p. 000), and they counted as
kin the legendary law professor John B. Minor,
whose diary (p. 000) dramatically recounts the
Union occupation of Grounds in 1865. Minor’s
marble bust (p. 000) was plucked from the collapsing Rotunda during the Great Fire of 1895
(pp. 000–­000).
These objects—a handkerchief, a certificate,
a letter, a poem, a diary, a piece of statuary—
reveal intricate, often astonishing histories, and
what we learn from them is not always pretty or
comfortable. Tools used to build the University
(p. 000), for example, remind us that much of
xi
the labor force that did so was enslaved. The
blackened hulk of a wooden cross (p. 000) once
lit up a faculty member’s front lawn. Such objects serve as important reminders that Thomas
Jefferson’s lofty ideal of an Academical Village
continues to be a work in progress.
Published on the occasion of the University’s
bicentennial, Mr. Jefferson’s Telescope does
not aspire to be the exhaustive (or exhausting)
five-­volume history published at the hundred-­
year mark. It is not impeccably objective as
Virginius Dabney, author of Mr. Jefferson’s University, declared his own 1981 book to be. This
history of things freely celebrates but is not
afraid condemn; it pokes fun; it revels in the
weird. (Did you know that the architect of Pavilion VII [p. 000] had a plan for raising George
Washington from the dead?) See it as a primer,
one that hopes to entertain and provoke as
well as to inform.
This project began with “Object Lesson,” an
article written by the editors of the University
of Virginia Magazine in 2014 that attempted
to tell the history of the University using fifty-­
odd objects. The number has since doubled
and the narrative expanded. But what now sits
before you is founded on the work of those
editors—Sean Lyons, Molly Minturn, Erin
O’Hare, Robert Viccellio—and borrows their
choices of objects. To help fill out the list, the
following people offered helpful suggestions:
Edward F. Gaynor, head of collection development and description for Special Collections;
Alexander G. “Sandy” Gilliam Jr., the University’s history officer emeritus; Maurie McInnis,
the former vice provost at the University and
now the provost at the University of Texas; and
Kirt von Daacke, professor of history and assistant dean.
Assistance and support also came from Coy
Barefoot; Matthew Chayt; Emily Cone-­Miller
and Julia F. Munro, from the project Jefferson’s
University—Early Life (JUEL); Kari S. Evans,
executive director of the bicentennial; Molly
Schwartzburg, a curator at the University’s
Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections
Library; Matthew Gibson, Peter Hedlund, and
Donna Lucey, of Encyclopedia Virginia at the
Virginia Foundation for the Humanities; Julia
Kudravetz; Nathan Moore, general manager
of WTJU radio; Paul Mott; Stefan Schöberlein;
Fred Shields; Dick Smith, facilities manager at
the School of Architecture; the Thomas Jefferson Foundation of Monticello; the Virginia
Historical Society; and Boyd Zenner at the
University of Virginia Press. In addition, Edward
Gaynor and Sandy Gilliam read the manuscript
and provided numerous invaluable suggestions
and corrections.
Thanks also to Molly Minturn and Stacey
Evans, without whom this book would not have
been possible.
xii
Mr. Jefferson’s Telescope
01
T
homas Jefferson was nothing if not a
visionary. His words gave form and substance to the idea of American independence
at a time when separation from Great Britain
was by no means certain. During his presidency, he supported an effective doubling of
the young nation’s size. He also commissioned
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s exploration of vast new territories. Mementos of their
travels, including deer antlers and antelope
horns, bows and arrows, and a painted buffalo
robe, still hang in the front entryway of Jefferson’s home at Monticello.
JEFFERSON’S
TELESCOPE
Just as the Declaration of Independence
was one of Jefferson’s masterpieces, so was
Monticello. In 1769 he began this lifelong
project of design and construction, influenced
by the Italian Renaissance architect Andrea
Palladio as well as the seemingly endless wonders of France. The house was still fairly small
when, in 1781, Jefferson reportedly used this
mahogany-­and-­silver-­plate telescope to watch
as British soldiers gathered in the streets of
nearby Charlottesville. He was approaching
the end of his second term as governor, and it
would be fair to say this was not one of his finest moments: rather than flee with the General
Assembly across the mountains to Staunton,
Jefferson rode to his retreat at Poplar Forest,
leaving Virginia without an elected governor
for almost a week. Legislators were outraged,
but by the time they launched an investigation
the war had been won. Almost in embarrassment they passed a resolution thanking Jefferson for his services. Still, Jefferson wrote to his
friend James Monroe that the whole affair had
2
3
What would Jefferson think? is a question
asked frequently at the University of Virginia,
during good times and bad, sometimes sincerely, other times rhetorically. What would Jefferson think of two hundred years of school history, of riot and Honor Code, of Civil War and
occupation, of fire and rebuilding? What would
he think of African American and female students, of IMPs and streaking on the Lawn? Of
Rolling Stone and the College World Series?
“inflicted a wound on my spirit which will only
be cured by the all-­healing grave.”
Jefferson was never a happy executive, and
he was relieved to retire from public life in
1809. And so it was back home that the aging statesman began to plan and build a final
masterpiece: the University of Virginia. One
can easily imagine Jefferson taking his spyglass
along with him on his walks on the north terrace of Monticello to view the progress of work
on the University. In fact, this image of the former president on his “little mountain,” peering
down at the fields that would soon become the
Academical Village, perfectly captures how his
legacy continues to loom over the institution.
One can only imagine. Yet even Jefferson
the visionary, his telescope in hand, might have
had trouble making sense of such a long and
complex history.
Thomas Jefferson
4
A
t Christmas in 1809, Joseph C. Cabell
presented this whalebone and ivory
walking stick to his friend Thomas Jefferson,
the recently retired president of the United
States. Both men had graduated from the College of William and Mary, gone on to study law,
and spent time in Europe. Cabell entered the
Senate of Virginia in 1810, and soon became
what Jefferson called the “main pillar of support” for his proposed state education system.
WHALEBONE
AND IVORY
WALKING STICK
Joseph Cabell
Formation of this system had long been one
of Jefferson’s pet projects. In 1786, he wrote
from Paris to his mentor George Wythe that
education would help protect the vision he had
articulated in the Declaration of Independence:
“No other sure foundation can be devised for
the preservation of freedom, and happiness. If
5
02
any body thinks that kings, nobles, or priests
are good conservators of public happiness,
send them here.”
Jefferson was right; the French Revolution
would erupt just a few years later. Virginians,
though, or at least those who controlled the
General Assembly, by and large shrugged at
such sentiments. In 1809–­10, legislators did
establish a literary fund for “the encouragement of learning,” and the next year they
appropriated money for educating the poor.
Then, in 1814, Jefferson attended a meeting of
supporters of the nascent Albemarle Academy;
within two weeks he was made a trustee. Here
Jefferson saw an opportunity. Not only would
he make one last push for the establishment
of public schools, but he would advocate for
a state university, one that would, he wrote a
friend that year, “probably absorb the functions
of Wm. and Mary college, and transfer them to
a healthier and more central location, perhaps
to the neighborhood of this place”—which is
to say, near Monticello.
In 1817 Joseph Cabell introduced a bill
authored by Jefferson that would have created a three-­tiered public education system
in Virginia, the top tier being a state university. By then, the Albemarle Academy had
been chartered as Central College, its site a
cornfield near Charlottesville belonging to
James Monroe. (Neither school ever had any
students, and Central College soon became
the University of Virginia.) In July two slaves
helped Jefferson mark the perimeter of the
site while ten more began turning over the
soil. On O
­ ctober 6, the Board of Visitors
6
laid a ­cornerstone at the site of what became
­Pavilion VII.
Edmund Bacon, Jefferson’s overseer at
Monticello, described that day’s events. James
Madison and President Monroe were present,
he reported, with the latter making a few short
remarks. As for Bacon’s boss: “Mr. Jefferson—
poor old man!—I can see his white head just as
he stood there and looked on.”
Cabell’s bill, meanwhile, failed, although
on February 21, 1818, the General Assembly
offered him and Jefferson a consolation gift,
appropriating $15,000 for a university and appointing a distinguished commission to select
a site. Said commission met at Rockfish Gap,
in the Blue Ridge Mountains, on August 1
and quickly elected Jefferson its president.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the
site the commissioners settled on was “in the
neighborhood” of Monticello, and that ground
had already been broken on it.
Thanks in large part to Cabell’s behind-­the-­
scenes efforts, the state chartered the University of Virginia on January 25, 1819. Cabell immediately joined Jefferson and James Madison
on the school’s board of visitors, succeeding
Madison as rector in 1834. He served until
1836, and then again from 1845 until his death
in 1856. Cabell Hall, built at the south end of
the Lawn in 1898, is named in his honor.
7
03
I
n 1814, Thomas Jefferson sketched an
­architectural plan for what was then still
intended to be Albemarle Academy and presented it to his fellow trustees on August 19.
Jefferson’s draftsmanship, an example of
which is to be found on both sides of a single
sheet of paper, is precise. His lines are perfectly straight if a little faded these many years
later, and one is tempted to describe them as
ghostly. It’s not only the lines, though, that give
that impression, but also the way that, in these
early renderings, the University appears and
disappears. The back side of the paper seems
to be empty or unfinished, but in fact the large
white space represents the Lawn, surrounded
on three sides by nine pavilions. The fourth
side was meant to remain open, the later construction of Cabell Hall notwithstanding, while
the Rotunda—well, Jefferson hadn’t thought of
the Rotunda yet. On the front side, Jefferson’s
drawing of a typical pavilion does not suggest the neoclassical influences that eventually
would predominate.
PLANS FOR THE
ACADEMICAL
VILLAGE
So much of Jefferson’s idea of the University was wrapped up not just in the fact of its
existence but in how it should be designed.
He was an architect at heart and had been
8
9
ever since purchasing his first book by Palladio
during his days at the College of William and
Mary. Influenced by Enlightenment principles,
Jefferson understood the symmetry favored by
the Greeks and Romans to have contained a
kind of spiritual logic, one that encompassed
harmony, proportion, and strength. But he
also understood the way in which design
could serve important practical purposes.
The College of William and Mary, in the west
end of Williamsburg, was housed within three
structures, the oldest of which was built in the
1690s. Jefferson considered them to be ugly—
the buildings of Williamsburg, he wrote in
Notes on the State of Virginia, were “maledictions over this land”—but he also worried that
such close quarters made the school unnecessarily vulnerable to fire and contagious disease.
Why not spread out a bit?
Over time, and with the advice of two professional architects, William Thornton and Benjamin Henry Latrobe, his design for the University
of Virginia began to take shape. The Academical Village, as he called it, would be arranged
in a U shape around a long, wide, terraced
lawn. At its head would stand a library; on the
sides, pavilions would serve as both professors’
lodgings and classrooms, all to be connected
by colonnades of single-­room student dormi­
tories and hotels, or dining halls.
Jefferson’s design would be practical and, of
course, beautiful. But it would also operate on
the level of symbolism, reflecting the classical
elements that were to be characteristic of the
University’s educational program. It would be a
model, a kind of textbook even.
10
11
04
I
n 2010, while preparing a historic structure report on the building, Mesick Cohen
Wilson Baker Architects discovered two early
nineteenth-­century tools in the corner of the
attic of student rooms near Hotel F on the
East Range. The tool on the right was used for
transferring angles of serrated roofs and belonged to James Dinsmore, a trusted builder
in Jefferson’s employ. Born in 1771 or 1772,
probably in County Antrim, Ireland, Dinsmore
immigrated to Philadelphia, where he became
a naturalized American citizen in 1798. It was in
that city that Jefferson hired him as a joiner and
even purchased tools for him. At Monticello
Dinsmore was responsible for the mansion’s
woodwork, including the doors, windows,
floors, and paneling. In 1809 he took his services to James Madison’s Montpelier, and after
the British set fire to Washington, D.C., he may
have contributed to the Capitol’s restoration.
EARLY TOOLS
In 1817, Jefferson invited Dinsmore and his
assistant, John Neilson, to help him build the
University of Virginia. Dinsmore spent the next
nine years on the University Grounds, where he
constructed three pavilions and fourteen dormitories. He and Neilson also helped build the
Rotunda. When his work was done, Dinsmore
stayed on in Charlottesville until, in 1830, he
drowned in the Rivanna River.
The tool on the left is a saw handle that
bears the Brockenbrough stamp. Arthur S.
Brockenbrough served as the University’s first
proctor, which meant that, among other things,
he handled the institution’s finances. He also
directed the initial flurry of building that lasted
until 1826, hiring workers and purchasing
12
materials. In May 1819, Jefferson wrote his
friend and fellow visitor John Hartwell Cocke
that Brockenbrough’s arrival “relieves my shoulders from a burthen too much for them.”
Free men like Dinsmore and Brockenbrough
did not shoulder the burden of realizing Jefferson’s vision alone, however. As many as fifty
enslaved workers were hired on an annual basis
from regional slaveholders—including from
Jefferson himself—and many more were hired
for shorter terms. In November 1818, an enslaved man known to history only as Carpenter
Sam began tinwork, probably under Dinsmore’s
supervision, and eventually helped to construct two pavilions and three hotels. University records also introduce us to Elijah, who
hauled quarried stone beginning in May 1820,
and William Green, an enslaved blacksmith
who started work in February 1821. Working
alongside free blacks and whites, many more
enslaved African Americans helped clear and
level the ground, haul timber, and make bricks.
Their labor was essential in the building of the
University.
13
05
T
his sketch of the Rotunda, rendered
in Thomas Jefferson’s hand using iron
gall ink, ought to look familiar. It is the model
for the University of Virginia’s official logo,
stamped on everything from the school’s website to the sides of its trucks. Remarkable, then,
that such a defining feature of the school’s
design was not in Jefferson’s original plan and,
in fact, wasn’t even his idea.
To his credit, Jefferson had from the very
beginning sought advice, in particular from
the professional architects William Thornton
and Benjamin Henry Latrobe. He had not told
either man he was talking to the other because, as the historian Garry Wills has noted,
they were “ferocious enemies.” Upon receiving
Jefferson’s request, the English-­born Latrobe
responded with enthusiasm, admitting that he
had fiddled with the former president’s ideas
so much that his stack of drawings had grown
too thick for the mail. Jefferson wrote back that
Latrobe should hurry up, since construction
had already begun.
SOUTH
ELEVATION OF
THE ROTUNDA
When Latrobe’s designs finally arrived in the
summer of 1817 they contained the suggestion
for some kind of domed structure at the head
of the Lawn. The idea caught Jefferson’s fancy,
and he worked on it over the next two years,
taking inspiration from the Pantheon in Rome
and from Latrobe’s own drawings. So important
was Latrobe to the design of the building that
Jefferson actually wrote his name in the upper
right-­hand corner of this drawing—“Latrobe
No. [illegible]”—but then crossed it out.
Latrobe is also credited on another drawing,
on which Jefferson wrote, “Latrobe’s Rotunda,
14
his builders, James Dinsmore and John Neilson, to work on the project. With enslaved men
put to the task of burning hundreds of thousands of bricks, this bit of Ancient Rome-­come-­
to‑Charlottesville slowly rose until by 1824 it was
more or less complete, in time for the Marquis
de Lafayette to enjoy a nice meal there.
reduced to the proportions of the Pantheon.”
But he scribbled that out, as well.
Why?
Latrobe had recently crossed swords with
Jefferson’s good friend President James
Monroe over work on the Capitol and as a
result resigned his position as its architect.
The architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson has speculated that Monroe “would not
have looked kindly on evidence of [Latrobe’s]
input.”
The Rotunda is impressive. Its columns are
of the Corinthian order, or principle of design,
which is considered to be the most ornate of
the three Greek orders. And the downhill slope
of the Lawn only makes it stand taller. Jefferson designed it to embody ideals of harmony,
proportion, and strength. No wonder it has
become the University’s logo.
In 1821, the University’s proctor, Arthur S.
Brockenbrough, presented the Board of Visitors with the exceedingly optimistic estimate of
$42,000 to build the Rotunda, and Jefferson set
15
06
T
he cornerstone for the University of Virginia was laid on October 6, 1817, at the
site of what would become Pavilion VII. This is
where Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of the Academical Village began its transformation into bricks
and mortar.
Pavilion VII looks different from the other
­ avilions. The columns do not extend below
p
the second story, for instance, and the lower
level is arcaded. It might be thought of as a
rough draft of sorts, one based on design suggestions from William Thornton. A polymath
like Jefferson, Thornton was born to British parents on a sugar plantation in the West Indies
and raised in a Quaker community in England.
He drew, painted, and studied medicine before
coming to Philadelphia in 1786. At length he
settled in Washington, D.C., where he won a
design competition for his domed vision of the
United States Capitol.
PAVILION VII
During this time, Thornton continued to
work as a physician, and in 1799 he had attended the deathbed of George Washington,
although, to be precise, he arrived too late.
Not to be discouraged, Thornton offered the
family and friends gathered at Mount Vernon
what even then was a unique remedy: bring
Washington back to life. According to an account he wrote many years later, Thornton
proposed “first to thaw [Washington] in cold
water, then to lay him in blankets, & by degrees
& by friction to give him warmth, and to put
into activity the minute blood vessels, at the
same time to open a passage to the Lungs
by the Trachaea, and to inflate them with air,”
and then “to transfuse blood into him from a
16
Pavilion VII. He might have included the other,
too, had he not received in the mail long-­
awaited designs from Thornton’s great enemy,
Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Latrobe’s drawings,
the same ones that included the idea for the
Rotunda, were so beautiful that Thornton was
now out and, for all subsequent pavilions,
Latrobe in.
lamb.” Perhaps not shockingly, Washington’s
family declined the offer.
Nevertheless, Thornton was not considered
a kook, at least by the standards of his day.
Although his two pavilion designs arrived accompanied by what Garry Wills has called “a
pompous dissertation on education,” Jefferson
took them seriously enough to adopt one for
17
07
O
ne might reasonably ask what exactly
constitutes the first minutes of the Board
of Visitors. After all, by 1819 visitors for Central
College had been convening for a couple
of years, and after the General Assembly
chartered the University of Virginia in January 1819, the old Central College visitors met
on February 26 to declare themselves, with
the governor’s blessing, the new University of
Virginia visitors. But that was basically all they
did, d
­ elaying any real action, their records
tell us, “until the first actual meeting of our
successors.” That came on March 29 and so
that must be considered the first meeting that
­produced the first minutes.
FIRST MINUTES
OF THE BOARD
OF VISITORS
The visitors convened on Grounds and were
by any estimation an eminent group. They
included the four Central College visitors—
Jefferson, James Madison, Joseph C. Cabell,
and John Hartwell Cocke—as well as three
new appointees: James Breckenridge, Chapman Johnson, and Robert Taylor. Jefferson and
Madison were both former U.S. presidents,
one the principal author of the Declaration of
Independence, the other often referred to as
the “Father of the Constitution.” Cabell was
an able legislator who, perhaps second only to
Jefferson, made this new university possible.
General Cocke, his rank having been earned
during the War of 1812, ran a plantation in
Fluvanna County and served on the board for
a remarkable thirty-­three years. Breckenridge
too was a general as well as a lawyer, who for
most of his civilian career served as a member
of either the Virginia House of Delegates or
the U.S. House of Representatives. Johnson
18
had been one of Breckenridge’s aides and now
served in the Senate of Virginia, while Taylor,
also a general, practiced law in Norfolk.
Before adjourning, the visitors accomplished
one last item of business, hiring Dr. Thomas
Cooper, of Philadelphia, as a professor of both
chemistry and law. Cooper does not appear on
subsequent lists of faculty members, however:
fierce opposition to the appointment required
him to resign the following year. An accomplished scientist and, according to Jefferson,
“one of the ablest men in America,” Cooper
had a reputation as a political agitator, having
served six months in prison for publicly criticizing President John Adams. Worse, he was an
advocate of Unitarianism. The latter was too
much for the Commonwealth’s conservative
clerics. Cooper, they insisted, had to go.
Even in such a group, Jefferson was a
towering figure, and the board’s first order
of business was to elect him the University’s
first rector. The proctor was then instructed to
undertake an audit of the school’s finances, as
well as “to provide a common seal for the University” that would feature “Minerva enrobed
in her Peplum.” The minutes also dictated professors’ salaries ($1,500 per year, plus lodging
in a pavilion) and student tuition—$30 per year
for every professor whose class was attended,
plus $20 per year for the use of a dormitory room that might be shared with another
­student.
And so it was that at its first meeting the Board
of Visitors stepped right into the often tricky politics of Virginia. It wouldn’t be the last time.
19
08
A
BUST OF
LAFAYETTE
gift to the University of Virginia from
France in 1904 to commemorate the
friendship between Thomas Jefferson and
the Marquis de Lafayette, this Sèvres porcelain bust of Lafayette is a copy of the original
created by Jean-­Antoine Houdon. Its location
in the Rotunda makes sense. In November
1824, Lafayette had been the guest of honor
at a dome room banquet attended by such
luminaries as Jefferson and James Madison. It
had been just one of many stops on a much-­
celebrated reunion tour for this French hero of
the American Revolution, and one Jefferson
had been planning for months.
The two men’s friendship dated back to Jefferson’s governorship and extended through
his diplomatic stay in Paris, but he and Lafayette had not seen each other in thirty-­five
years. By any measure, the latter had led a
remarkable life. He joined the military at the
age of thirteen, and was a general fighting
for the American colonists by the time he was
nineteen. He led one of the decisive attacks
at Yorktown and then, inspired by Jefferson,
helped draft the Declaration of the Rights of
Man during the French Revolution. In 1824,
Lafayette was still suffering from ill health as a
result of five years spent as a prisoner of the
Austrians in the 1790s, and his reputation, at
least in France, fluctuated in accordance with
whoever happened to be in power at a given
time. In the United States, however, he was a
hero, one who reminded the country of its impending fiftieth anniversary
20
In a letter dated September 3, 1824, Jefferson told Lafayette that if he could, he’d keep
the Frenchman all to himself at Monticello.
As it was, he promised to host a dinner at the
University of Virginia, and that occurred, according to Lafayette’s memoirs, on November
8. The Rotunda by then was mostly finished
on the outside, although the steps leading up
to the entrance were temporary ones made of
wood, and the capitals were still being carved
in Italy. Work on the inside was in progress, and
even with all of that dust from the construction
it must have come across as sparkling and new,
a glimpse of the future for these old lions of
the past.
“I found [Jefferson] . . . bearing marvelously well under his eighty one years of age,”
­Lafayette, then a robust sixty-­seven, recalled,
“in full possession of all the vigor of his mind
and heart which he has consecrated to the
building of a good and fine university.”
That university would host its first class of
students in the spring of 1825, and a hundred
years later dedicate a room in Pavilion VI to the
friendship between Jefferson and Lafayette,
the United States and France.
21
09
T
homas Jefferson presented this chalice
to Dr. Robley Dunglison, the University
of Virginia’s first professor of medicine, shortly
before the founder’s death in 1826. While Jefferson was leery of doctors—he was quoted
by Dunglison as saying, “It is not to physic that
I object, so much as physicians”—Dunglison
earned enough of Jefferson’s trust to become
his personal physician not long after arriving
on Grounds in March 1825.
Dunglison was one of several Europeans
among the founding faculty at the University.
Despite having once disparaged European
education for producing so many “kings,
nobles, or priests,” Jefferson sent Francis
Walker Gilmer to England in search of suitable scholars. Find only the best, he instructed
Gilmer: “characters of due degree of science,
and of talents for instruction, and of correct
habits and morals.” This was not an easy task,
and after much hunting about, Gilmer managed to sign up only three: Thomas Hewitt Key,
professor of mathematics; Charles Bonnycastle,
professor of natural philosophy; and Dunglison. They set sail from London in October
1824, but bad weather on the Thames and
storms in the ­Atlantic stretched a typical fourto five-­week journey into an arduous fourteen-­
week marathon. At one point, according to
Dunglison’s later recollection, a nasty squall off
Cape ­Hatteras brought Bonnycastle rushing
onto deck, “almost in puris naturalibus, with his
nightcap on, and his appearance was so droll
as to excite the laughter of the sailors.”
DUNGLISON
CHALICE
The trio’s delayed arrival forced Jefferson to
postpone the inaugural session of classes until
22
23
Bricks from the Anatomical Theatre, which was razed in 1939
Anatomical Theatre was completed in 1826
near what is now Alderman Library; it burned
and was rebuilt in 1886, and finally was razed
in 1939.
March 7, 1825. Dunglison, installed as the first
full-­time professor of medicine at an American
university, lectured 26 of that year’s 125 or
so students. He was obliged to mention to
­Jefferson that the front room of his residence
in Pavilion X, intended as classroom space, was
not the ideal spot for dissecting cadavers. For
that matter, Dunglison found much about the
University to be inconvenient, blaming Jefferson’s “desire for having everything architecturally correct according to his taste.” Jefferson
responded to the new professor’s complaint
by pulling out his iron gall ink and sketching an
octagonal amphitheater ideal for the ­student
observation of surgical procedures. The
Dunglison stayed on at the University until
1833, having served as chairman of the faculty
in 1826 and again from 1828 to 1830. His book
Human Physiology, dedicated to James Madison and published in 1832, was the first comprehensive treatise on the subject and became
justly renowned, as did a medical dictionary for
which he was a primary contributor, as did his
research on gastric digestion. He died in 1869.
24
25
10
H
JEFFERSON’S
HAIR
ow much does the University of Virginia love—even worship—its founder?
Exhibit A: a lock of Thomas Jefferson’s hair. To
be fair, in the nineteenth century people often
kept, as a token of remembrance, a lock of hair
from a loved one who had died. This particular
lock, clipped from the corpse by Nicholas P.
Trist, Jefferson’s private secretary and the husband of his granddaughter Virginia Randolph,
came to the University as part of a collection
of Jefferson family documents and not, as the
above might otherwise imply, as part of any
cultish remembrance ceremony.
And yet such remembrance, at least in the
instance of Jefferson and his college, would
be altogether appropriate. More than perhaps
any public university, the University of Virginia
represents a single man’s vision. One might
even say it serves as the external manifestation of that man’s mind. Jefferson, after all,
lived much of his life in thought, operating
from the tidy ideals of Enlightenment rationalism. Predictably, the visions founded on such
ideals did not always stand up to reality. The
University of Virginia, though, somehow ended
differently. It was Jefferson’s cherished idea,
one he had spent years working out on paper.
The Grounds, he imagined, would be a kind of
New England village, where all men lived together without class distinction, set curriculum,
or religious dogma, devoted only to the latest
in liberal and scientific learning. There were
contradictions, of course, and compromises
and cost overruns. But more than many of Jefferson’s big ideas, this one survived the harsh
light that shone outside of his mind.
26
of One Man, goes on to suggest how “very
appropriate” it was that Jefferson sat in the
Rotunda, the “noblest” of the University’s
buildings. But what’s also striking is how the
aged farmer-­philosopher-­statesman-­educator
seemed, even then, to be caught up in the
tangle of his own thoughts. A lock of hair, a
terraced lawn—they now serve as important
reminders of the uncommon life he lived outside his head.
This university was not just his; it was him.
Philip Alexander Bruce, a graduate of the
University and its centennial historian, pictures
Jefferson on his final visit to Grounds, “looking
out through a window on the Lawn to watch
the workingmen as they raised a capital to the
top of the column at the southwest corner of
the portico. So oblivious was he of all besides
that he had unconsciously remained standing
until [the University librarian] silently brought
him a chair.”
Bruce, whose five-­volume history of the
University is subtitled The Lengthened Shadow
27
11
O
POE’S LIBRARY
FINE
ne of the University of Virginia’s first
students also became one of its most
famous: Edgar Allan Poe. This ledger from the
school’s archives lists the future poet as owing
fifty-­eight cents for an overdue book he had
checked out four months after matriculating on
February 14, 1826. Poe stayed for an entire session, until December 15, when he was forced
by money troubles to leave. He never paid his
fine, although the ledger shows that the librarian Harry Clemons quietly settled the account
more than a century later.
According to friends who remembered him
from those days, Poe was a good student
who attended classes on ancient and modern
languages and served as secretary of the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society. Although
he rarely came prepared to lectures, his quick
mind and prodigious memory frequently saved
him if and when he was called upon. Just seventeen when he entered the University, Poe
was described by his classmate Thomas G.
Tucker as being “rather short of stature, thick,
and somewhat compactly set.” Also “bow-­
legged” and prone to rushing places “with a
certain jerkiness in his hurried movements.”
This jibes with the recollection of another
friend, Miles George, who found Poe to be, by
turns, “frolicsome” and “full of fun” and “melancholic and morose,” someone with “excessive nervous excitability” for which he prescribed himself the “Invisible Spirit of Wine.”
His semester on Grounds was marked by a
duel with a roommate and gambling at cards.
In 1884 an acquaintance named William M.
Burwell told the New Orleans Times-­Democrat
28
that Poe plunged into this “particular dissipation . . . with a recklessness of nature which
acknowledged no restraint,” leading “to a loss
of caste among his high-­spirited and exclusive
associates.”
Burwell blamed Poe’s vice, or at least some
of its consequences, on the overly indulgent
culture of the University of Virginia, which
was loathe to place too many strictures on
its gentleman scholars. Here, perhaps, was
an instance in which Jefferson’s ideas of what
ought to be did not quite square with life as
it was actually lived. “Mr. Jefferson,” Burwell
wrote, “having assumed that these high-­
spirited coadjators [sic] in the defense of our
constitutional ramparts comprehended his patriotic motives, had provided no discipline for
their scholastic deportment.”
29
12
T
A VOYAGE TO
THE MOON
he author of A Voyage to the Moon (1827)
is said to be one Joseph Atterley, who
promises his readers an “account of the manners and customs, science and philosophy”
of, well, moon men. Writing in the American
Quarterly Review, Robley Dunglison, the University of Virginia’s first professor of medicine,
pronounced the novel a work of satirical genius
and feigned ignorance as to its true author.
But he knew perfectly well—it was his friend
and fellow professor at the University George
Tucker.
A native of Bermuda and a cousin of the
well-­known jurist St. George Tucker, George
Tucker had served in the Virginia House of
Delegates and then, from 1819 to 1825, in the
U.S. House of Representatives. While in Congress he wrote The Valley of Shenandoah, one
of the first southern novels and one of the first
works of American fiction to dramatize slavery.
He also published Essays on Various Subjects
of Taste, Morals, and National Policy, a book
that caught the eye of Thomas Jefferson, who
hired its author to lecture on “mental sciences
generally, including Ideology, general grammar, logic and Ethics.” Tucker also took on the
duties of faculty chairman, making him responsible, in Jefferson’s nonhierarchical society of
scholars, for the day-­to‑day administration of
the University.
30
31
According to the historian Philip Alexander
Bruce, while Dunglison was “fine looking and
agreeable,” Tucker was “the most popular of
all the professors . . . the fountains of whose
geniality never ran dry, and who never failed
to delight with his keen sense of humor, his
inexhaustible fund of anecdotes, and his racy
information on every subject that arose in conversation.”
A Voyage to the Moon, in the sheer breadth
of its erudition, might serve as an adequate
stand‑in for conversation with Professor Tucker.
In taking his hero Atterley first, by shipwreck,
to the wilds of India and then, by spaceship,
to “luna firma,” Tucker finds occasion to tweak
nationalism and American politics, investigate
the arts in Egypt, expound on physiognomy
and piracy, rebut a theory of beauty as he finds
it in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and reenact
a rough approximation of America’s racial controversies.
perhaps, it failed to give satisfaction to the
ardent supporters, as well as to the bitter opponents of Mr. Jefferson.”
Following his retirement in 1845, Tucker
authored a four-­volume history of the United
States, the final volume of which appeared in
1858. Among other things it made an argument for slavery’s positive effect on society,
responded to the institution’s critics by arguing
that it would die out anyway, and boldly asserted to those who worried that civil war was
around the corner that “there seems to be no
solid ground for these apprehensions.”
The cosmos must have taken note of his
self-­assurance, however, because three years
later—with Virginia on the verge of secession
and the bombardment of Fort Sumter just two
days away—Tucker died from the effects of being struck by a falling cotton bale.
The novel was, in the parlance of today’s
book reviewers, ambitious. It also was an
early attempt at science fiction and may have
influenced Edgar Allan Poe to publish his own
voyage-­to‑the-­moon story in 1835, in turn influencing Jules Verne’s classic From Earth to the
Moon (1865).
Tucker went on to write a two-­volume biography of Jefferson that, according to his friend
Dunglison, did not always summon sympathy
for its subject. “The work, indeed, manifests
a laudable desire to do justice,” Dunglison
observed in Tucker’s obituary, “and to decide
impartially on contested topics; and hence,
32
O
ne scholar has suggested that “the
queerness of the Crackerbox is palpable,” and he’s not wrong. This tiny, two-­story
building at the rear of Hotel F and at the foot
of Pavilion Garden X looks like little else on
Grounds. Built sometime between 1826 and
1840, it probably served as a kitchen and cook’s
quarters for the East Range hotels, although
some wag told the Cavalier Daily in 1974
“that Mr. Jefferson, wishing to keep students
away from the lower class establishments in
town, established a University ‘bordello’ in the
­building.”
THE
CRACKERBOX
As it happens, structures like this were
thrown up and torn down fairly often as the
University’s needs changed. The “need” in
this case was for the labor of enslaved men,
women, and children. Here they cooked, while
elsewhere on Grounds they served, cleaned
rooms, washed windows, carried water, stacked
wood, hauled ice, blacked boots, trimmed
candle wicks, and ran errands.
Although slaves had been at the University since the cornerstone was laid, the first
students were prohibited from bringing any of
their own onto Grounds. Jefferson believed
that the tyranny of slavery made tyrants of
young men, yet this did not convince him that
there shouldn’t be slaves at the University of
Virginia—just that the students shouldn’t own
them. Professors, meanwhile, could bring their
slaves, and many did. The University itself only
ever owned a single slave, but it rented a minimum of five to eight a year. More belonged to
hotelkeepers who operated as independent
33
13
contractors, using enslaved labor to tend to
nearly every imaginable student need.
Examples of extreme mistreatment were
not unknown, such as the incident in which
one young scholar attacked a hotel slave with
a Bowie knife in 1839. The student, Frederick
Hall, was expelled for the assault, along with
many other infractions that did not involve
slaves. Around the same time, two students
administered to an enslaved man named Fielding what the faculty secretary later described as
“a severe and inhuman beating.” Fielding belonged to Professor Charles Bonnycastle, and
when the latter intervened in the scuffle, he
himself was assaulted, although only verbally.
In this instance, the faculty responded with less
assurance, referring the matter to civil authorities, who declined to act.
The queerness of the Crackerbox is a testament, perhaps, to the queerness of slavery’s
legacy on Grounds. Enslaved African Americans built the University, and for most of its
first five decades they performed the most
menial and demanding labor. In recent years,
the University has begun to take important
steps to acknowledge and commemorate the
slave experience on Grounds. Much about the
history of slavery at the University has been illuminated. Still, the mystery of the Crackerbox
remains, as if begging visitors to wonder how
it got there and what its purpose could have
been.
34
35
14
T
PHOTOGRAPH
OF SALLY
COTTRELL COLE
here are few images of slaves at the
University of Virginia, but this one of
Sally Cottrell Cole survives. Born around 1800,
Sally Cottrell served at Monticello as a maid to
Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughter, Ellen Randolph Coolidge. In 1825, the Jefferson family
hired Cottrell out to the English-­born professor of mathematics Thomas Hewitt Key, who,
upon arriving in Virginia, had determined that
his pregnant wife needed a nurse and maid.
Cottrell was less than thrilled about the new
arrangement. One of the Jeffersons reported
that she “objected to living at the University
but agreed to stay until Mrs. K was out of her
confinement.”
She apparently stayed longer, though,
because in 1827 Cottrell was still on Grounds
with the Keys, who by this time had become
disenchanted with the University of Virginia.
In addition to finding the students unruly and
violent, Thomas Key did not seem to get along
with many of the faculty, including the German
professor of modern languages George Blaettermann, whom Key is alleged to have kicked
under a table. (Blaettermann, once described
by a student as looking like a hogshead of
tobacco, told Key he “kicked like an ass.”) Joseph Coolidge, Ellen Randolph Coolidge’s husband, found Key to be exasperating, declaring
him to be “one of those Englishmen who have
succeeded in making their nation hated in every part of the known world.”
Some of that exasperation may have
stemmed from the Keys’ conclusion that what
Professor Key called the “creature comforts”
of Virginia were not worth the toll they took on
36
one’s conscience. They decided to return to
England, but were not content merely to send
Cottrell back to Monticello. Instead, in July
1827 Key negotiated with Coolidge to purchase Cottrell—for the bargain price of $400—
with the express purpose of freeing her. There
was a problem, however: Virginia law required
any newly freed slaves to leave the state within
one year if they were not granted permission to
remain, so in exchange for her freedom Cottrell
would have to risk abandoning her home, her
family, and her friends.
Under these circumstances, Cottrell chose
to remain enslaved. To her great good fortune,
however, the law professor John A. G. Davis
took custody of her, allowing her to live more
or less as a free woman.
Cottrell worked as a seamstress, was baptized in Charlottesville, and in 1846 married a
free black man named Reuben Cole. The fact
that the marriage was recorded at all suggests that the community viewed Cottrell as a
free woman, even if the law did not technically
agree. All was fine until 1850, when communities around the state began charging free
blacks with illegally remaining in the Commonwealth.. Because the Keys still technically
owned Cottrell, the late Professor Davis’s son
posted an urgent letter to London concerning
the matter, worrying that “as a slave going at
large she was liable to be taken up and sold”—
which is to say, separated from her husband
and family. Any reply that may have been
sent has been lost, but Cottrell was fortunate:
she continued to live and work in Albemarle
County until her death in 1875.
37
15
T
SIDEREAL CLOCK
his Parkinson and Frodsham sidereal
clock was purchased in London in 1827
for the University of Virginia. Sidereal clocks,
or “star clocks,” measure time based on the
Earth’s rate of rotation relative to fixed stars,
helping astronomers know where to point
their telescopes to view the night sky. From
1827 to 1885, the clock sat in the Rotunda, and
students would look through a window to read
it when they were outside working with their
telescopes. In nearly continuous operation
since 1827, the clock was moved to McCormick
Observatory when it was built in 1885.
The observatory was named for Leander J. McCormick of Rockbridge County,
whose father Robert had invented—and his
brother Cyrus more famously improved and
patented—a version of the mechanical reaper,
which revolutionized how farmers harvested
their crops. After making his fortune in the
family business, Leander McCormick was determined to purchase and donate the world’s
largest telescope, preferably to an educational
institution in Virginia. He flirted with the idea
of making his gift to Washington and Lee University, but eventually settled on the University
of Virginia, which dedicated its new domed
observatory on Jefferson’s birthday: April 13,
1885. By that time the refractor telescope,
manufactured by Alvan Clark and Sons of Massachusetts, was only the second largest in the
world, but it had already been used to confirm
the discovery of the moons of Mars.
38
39
With the advent of electricity and the expansion of Charlottesville, light pollution chased
the astronomers off their hilltop perch and to
southern Albemarle County, where the Fan
Mountain Observatory opened in 1966. The
telescope and the dome, however, still remain
on Mount Jefferson, locally known as Observatory Hill. There, the sidereal clock continues to
mark its star time.
McCormick Observatory, 1920
40
T
his bookcase in the front room of Pavilion
VII now displays English china, but it once
held volumes in the University’s original library,
located first in the pavilion and then, when
construction finished in 1826, in the upper floor
of the Rotunda. An enthusiastic book collector,
Thomas Jefferson famously sold his personal
collection to the Library of Congress, but he
also drew up a long list of titles that came to
form the nucleus of his university’s catalog. It
totaled 6,860 volumes that, once acquired, set
the proctor back $24,076.50.
BOOKCASE IN
PAVILION VII
According to one story, the University’s
librarian, William Wertenbaker, was unpacking the first shipment of books when Jefferson
stopped him, pointing at Edward Gibbon’s The
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire.
William Wertenbaker
41
16
Austin of Dedham, Massachusetts, generously
contributed 5,000 volumes, classical works
mostly, many of them rare. Sadly, a great many
of these were destroyed in the Great Fire of
1895, which claimed about 35,000 volumes out
of a total of 56,733.
“You ought not to have received that book,”
Jefferson snapped. “It should have been
­returned.”
“Why?” Wertenbaker asked. “It is a very
handsome edition.”
“That may be so, but look at the back.”
By 1904, the library’s collection was back up
to about 50,000. This was the same year that
Edwin Anderson Alderman became the University of Virginia’s first president, Jefferson’s idea
of faculty chairmen having been abandoned. A
former librarian, Alderman announced in 1924
a plan to construct a new, million-­dollar library
to relieve the now-­outdated and overflowing
facility in the Rotunda. Completed after the
president’s death, the library was dedicated
and named in Alderman’s honor in 1938. At
this writing, the library has expanded to twelve
separate facilities, including the Alderman Library, and contains 5,410,391 volumes.
And there it was: “Gibborn’s” instead of
“Gibbon’s.”
First the fall of Rome, then the fall of editing
standards.
Jefferson had also directed that a number of
his own remaining books, along with a bust of
himself by the Italian sculptor Giuseppe Caracchi, be presented to the library upon his death.
However, in an apologetic letter to the Board of
Visitors in December 1826, the executor of Jefferson’s estate explained that these items had to
be sold in order to cover outstanding debts.
James Madison also bequeathed books to
the library and, like his friend Jefferson’s, his estate seems to have reneged, or at least to have
tried. Madison died in 1836, and four years
later the faculty is recorded as politely asking
Dolley Madison about their books. By 1852,
they had actually filed suit, and Wertenbaker
was forced to travel to Montpelier, a number of
empty boxes helpfully in hand.
Wertenbaker remained at the University until
1881—it’s said he was the last individual there
to have known Jefferson personally—and in
those years the library continued to grow. In
addition to whatever of his volumes were left
(587 out of about 4,000), Madison’s estate donated $1,500. In 1885, the estate of Arthur W.
42
43
17
I
n April 2013, a historic preservation firm discovered a chemical furnace in the lower east
oval room of the Rotunda. John Patten Emmet,
the University of Virginia’s first professor of
chemistry, wrote in an 1825 letter to Thomas
Jefferson that the chemical furnace in Pavilion
I “makes my room oppressively hot & myself
even more so.” Emmet requested larger facilities for the chemical laboratory and appears
to have been granted use of the two lower
ROTUNDA
CHEMICAL
FURNACE
John P. Emmet
oval rooms in the Rotunda. There he lectured
and ran the “Chemical apparatus,” as it was
called in University records, with the help of
an enslaved assistant. The furnace was bricked
over sometime around 1845 and survived the
1895 fire and 1970s renovation of the Rotunda.
44
When it was discovered, the furnace was piled
with crucibles, stacks of small glass plates, and
glass tubes that had been heated and twisted
in experiments.
John Emmet was born in Dublin, Ireland, in
1796. His uncle, the rebel Robert Emmet, was
hanged and beheaded by the British in 1803, a
circumstance that made life difficult for the rest
of the Emmet family. (Young Emmet’s father,
Thomas, had already served prison time for his
role in the uprising of 1798.) By 1805, the family
was safely in New York, where John attended
the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He
later studied medicine and chemistry, joining
the University of Virginia faculty in 1825.
Emmet had a lively intellect, and as chair of
the School of Natural History, he lectured not
just on chemistry but also on botany, geology,
mineralogy, and zoology. He populated Pavilion I with an assortment of wild animals, including snakes, an owl, and a bear, and when his
new wife shut down the zoo, he built a home of
his own design called Morea, which still stands
on Sprigg Lane in Charlottesville. There he
planted a Jeffersonian garden that included
mulberries for silkworm cultivation. He drew on
his chemistry background to invent cements,
paints, and weatherproofing materials for his
house—all right there in the lower level of the
Rotunda.
Never in particularly good health, Emmet
had contracted smallpox, measles, and whooping cough as a young man and then became ill
again in 1842. After taking a leave of absence
from the University, he died in New York City
on August 13 of that year.
45
18
T
his drawing of a University of Virginia
student appears on page 241 of Porte
Crayon’s Virginia Illustrated, a collection of the
artist’s travel narratives published in 1871. Born
David Hunter Strother in Martinsburg, Crayon
visited Grounds in 1853, taking a moment
to sketch this particular dandy as he posed
on the Lawn. “Indeed,” Crayon states in his
book, “it gives me great pleasure to say that,
although the vivacity of these blooded colts at
our Virginia colleges frequently leads them into
all sorts of deviltries and excesses, they have
almost invariably the manners of gentlemen.”
THE STUDENT
Crayon may have been understating the
case. According to the authors of a 2013 history suggestively titled Rot, Riot, and Rebellion, in the University’s first decade and a half
these students “turned their dorm rooms into
gaming establishments and whorehouses
and the university into a vast saloon.” In the
1830s alone, there were several riots, several
duels, and the semi-­regular shooting of dogs.
Students cut the tail off one professor’s horse
and the mane from another. At one point they
held the proctor down and threatened him
with a knife, while on other occasions they set
off fireworks on the West Range and bombs
under professors’ windows. They also set fire to
an outhouse and, after blocking the only exit,
forced smoke into George Tucker’s office.
Only occasionally were students severely
punished for such “pranks,” in part because
any outsized reaction would invite bad publicity for the University, which, in turn, might
discourage already tight-­fisted legislators from
supporting the institution. In 1839, Professor
46
Gessner Harrison—the first former student to
serve on the faculty—was horsewhipped by his
own charges. Although someone was arrested
for the crime, a hastily assembled student
mob convinced authorities to drop all charges
against him.
At least until the murder of a professor in
1840, the worst incident of student misbehavior
came in November 1836, when these “blooded
colts” openly revolted against their professors and rioted for two nights. Already worried
about the potential for violence on Grounds,
the faculty had placed strict controls on the
muskets used by the school’s drill company, the
University Volunteers. When such controls were
ignored, the professors attempted to disband
the company and confiscate the University-­
owned weapons. This only made things worse.
With his sixty-­three young men armed and at
attention on the Lawn, a company officer yelled
out, “Resolved. That we have our arms and intend to keep them.” The students voted “aye”
in unison by shouldering their muskets. What
followed was a weekend’s worth of mob violence that included the widespread destruction
of University property and brickbats, literally,
being heaved at the professors. When all was
through, seventy students were expelled.
Just seventeen years later, the gentlemen
scholars had calmed down enough for Mr.
Crayon and his traveling companions to find
them utterly charming if, by his estimation, a
little sleep-­deprived. And the Grounds? “The
whole has a very pleasing and pretty effect,”
the illustrator observed, “but the buildings are
too low, and the architecture wants finish.”
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19
F
or years afterward, students at the University of Virginia celebrated the anniversary
of their riot of 1836 by, well, rioting. The scene
was no different on November 12, 1840—pistol
shots, firecrackers, and general unruliness—­
except that when it was all over, a professor,
John A. G. Davis, lay mortally wounded. In
this letter to his brother, dated the next day,
the student Robert Lewis Dabney, of Louisa
County, explains what happened:
LETTER FROM
ROBERT LEWIS
DABNEY TO HIS
BROTHER
There were only two rioters seen, who had been firing blank cartridges about the doors of the professors, masked and disguised. The two passed freely
within a few feet of the peaceful students, completely concealed by their disguises, when one of the
students told them to take care, as Mr. Davis was on
the watch, near his house [Pavilion X]. One of the two
immediately walked down that way, loading his pistol; but, in addition to the former charge of powder,
he was seen to put in a ball, ramming it down against
the wall of the house as he went. Nobody at that
time, however, suspected anything, or felt himself
authorized to interfere. A few moments after another
report was heard, and the masked figure was seen
making off across the lawn. Some of the students
heard groans, and, going out, found Mr. Davis down
and unable to rise. He said that he had gone out to
preserve order; that he saw the masked figure, attempted to take hold of him and take off the mask,
but that he dodged him, retreated a few yards, and
then, after he (Mr. Davis) had ceased to pursue,
turned and fired.
Davis was gut-­shot and died a few days later.
A professor of law and, at the time of his death,
chairman of the faculty, he was a Virginia native
and through his wife related to Thomas Jefferson. His sudden and violent end—Davis was
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49
not yet forty—provoked shock and outrage
from faculty, the Board of Visitors, and, for that
matter, the entire state. Even the students, who
up until that point had observed a strict code
of silence when it came to snitching, seemed
chastened. Doctors pulled a lead ball that had
been lodged below Professor Davis’s hip bone
and students helped trace it back to one of
their own: Joseph G. Semmes, of Washington,
Georgia.
A pair of students, armed with a warrant,
captured Semmes and he was briefly confined
John A. G. Davis
in the county jail before posting bail and fleeing the state. In 1847 a newspaper reported his
“Melancholy End,” by suicide, in the Georgia
home of his brother.
It was Davis’s successor, Henry St. George,
who came up with the idea for the University’s
Honor Code, which was established on July 4,
1842. At least one historian has suggested
that its connection to Davis’s murder is a myth;
however, the authors of Rot, Riot, and Rebellion make a strong case that the shooting
marked a pivotal moment in University culture.
Whereas a strict adherence to “honor” had
once prevented students from informing on
one another, professors now encouraged students to think of honor as a means of serving
the larger good of the University. Such appeals
proved successful in stemming the tides of
both violence and academic misconduct. The
Honor Code, which requires students not to
lie, cheat, or steal, and to accept dismissal if
they do, continues to play a significant role in
student life on Grounds today.
Whatever its legacy, Davis’s murder had an
indelible effect on the students who witnessed
it. In his letter Dabney writes, “I will venture to
say that no crime was ever attended with more
tragical scenes and more exciting scenes. The
young men who carried him [Davis] in say that
the sight of Mrs. Davis and her sufferings was
painful beyond conception, and produced
emotions in themselves more intense than they
had ever experienced.”
50
F
amily history maintains that this cabinet
belonged to William Barton Rogers, a
professor of natural philosophy at the University of Virginia from 1835 to 1853. Rogers, who
went on to found the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, taught geology in the lower east
oval room of the Rotunda, and likely used the
cabinet to store mineral specimens for teaching purposes. The cabinet’s doors, moldings,
and graining are similar to other woodwork examples from the Academical Village at the time.
Preservationists say it may be the only existing
piece of original furniture from the Rotunda.
WILLIAM BARTON
ROGERS’S
CABINET
William Barton Rogers
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20
the courses. Bonnycastle handled geometry,
surveying, roads, railroads, canals, and bridges;
Rogers taught theoretical mechanics, hydrodynamics, and geology. He was particularly
fond of the latter study, having served as state
geologist and spent, in his words, “much of
[his] leisure time” tramping through the hills
and mountains of Virginia collecting rock
samples. Mount Rogers, located in Grayson
and Smyth Counties and at 5,729 feet the
Commonwealth’s highest peak, is named for
the professor.
In his five-­volume history of the University,
Philip Alexander Bruce does little to conceal
his admiration for members of the faculty. (One
notable exception: George Blaettermann,
who, Bruce tells us, “showed a violent spleen
at times” and was fired in 1840 for beating his
wife in public.) However, his praise of William
Rogers was fulsome even by his standards.
Rogers, he writes, was “distinguished far and
wide for vivid eloquence in the classroom,”
and despite his relative youth “possessed an
almost tropical imagination, and a disposition
of poetic susceptibility.”
(Nota bene: Rogers is the only University of
Virginia professor to have his name included
among the most important natural historians
on the facade of Brooks Hall.)
A Philadelphia native and like his three
brothers a distinguished scientist, Rogers held
a “mesmeric dominion over his audiences,” according to Bruce, and his weekly lectures were
standing room only. “Old Bill really liked this
proof of his popularity, and would find occasion
to let himself go,” recalled Edward S. Joynes,
a classics professor. “He would walk backward
and forward behind the long table, speaking
without notes, and borne along by the sympathy of the audience. He had a way of passing
his right finger down the side of his nose, and
whenever that happened, a murmur would
run around the room, ‘Look out, boys, Old Bill
is going to curl,’ and curl he could and did as
no other man could.” (The meaning of curl is
somewhat obscure, but in this case it seems to
signify long-­winded speechifying.)
On August 13, 1836, the Board of Visitors approved a new school of engineering—the first
in the South and the first at a comprehensive
university. Rogers collaborated with Charles
Bonnycastle to develop a curriculum and teach
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53
21
T
his medal dates to 1889 and was awarded
by the Washington Society to its vice
president and best debater, J. E. Barclay, of
Kentucky. The Jefferson Society handed out
similar awards, although it should be noted
that the now mostly forgotten Patrick Henry
Literary Society arrived on the scene first. Established in 1825, the Henry Society mischievously took the name of Thomas Jefferson’s
great political rival. When its meetings grew
too rowdy, however, several members broke off
and formed the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society. These renegades even invited Mr.
Jefferson himself to join. The historian Philip
Alexander Bruce has suggested that while Jefferson’s message of polite refusal was “nice,”
it may have been “carried so far as to appear
too refined.” After all, neither James Madison
nor James Monroe snubbed their membership
offers.
WASHINGTON
SOCIETY MEDAL
All went fine until 1832, when the Jefferson
Society asked permission to deliver an oration
on the occasion of Jefferson’s birthday. The faculty approved, only to be horrified when said
speech argued in behalf of abolishing slavery.
(By way of context, the General Assembly, in
the aftermath of the bloody Nat Turner revolt
the year before, was then considering the very
same issue, with windy addresses on both
sides of the question being transcribed in the
Richmond papers.) Word came down that no
more speeches should be given about matters
of national policy or religion. When the society
next asked to present a speech, the event was
moved off Grounds.
54
Society alone. The groups staged elaborate
balls on Jefferson and Washington’s birthdays,
and rewarded accomplishments in speaking
and writing. Each society bestowed a debating
medal and jointly honored the best essay. The
latter award was selected by the faculty, the
former by the societies themselves, although,
opines one historian, it “was as often given to
the most popular man as to the best debater.”
At some point the Henry Society faded away,
and by 1835 the Washington Literary Society
and Debating Union had organized, bringing
together two other groups: the Association for
Mutual Improvement in the Art of Oratory and
the Academics Society. According to Bruce,
the consequent “increase in the number of imprudent young orators . . . seems to have been
so irksome to the patience of the Visitors” that
in 1838 they banned all public speeches. “We
are forbidden to speak,” lamented a student
publication. “The tongue falters, the lips are
closed, and the voice of vivid eloquence must
ring through our Corinthian columns no more.”
This same historian, writing in 1904, recalled
raucous, beer-­fueled “caucuses” convened to
choose medal winners, expressing regret that
the faculty had taken over that honor. “I do not
believe the Societies have been as successful,
or as much interest has been taken in them,”
he wrote, “now that a Committee of the older
folk sit in solemn judgment and award the
medal to the best debater.”
The ban was lifted a few years later, and the
societies grew in popularity to the degree that
in 1856 nearly a quarter of the student body—
155 out of 650—belonged to the Jefferson
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22
T
his student sketch of Professor Maximilian
Schele De Vere is rare in that it depicts
“Our German Professor” before he sprouted
his trademark mustache and sideburns. At the
height of his powers he was remarkably hirsute,
and later portraits depict more of the scowling
Teuton than we find here.
STUDENT SKETCH
OF MAXIMILIAN
SCHELE DE VERE
In fact, Schele De Vere was not German but
Swedish. His father, a Swedish army officer,
did have Prussian roots, though, and sent
his son to Germany to study languages and
the law. Schele De Vere’s lengthy birth name
ended in von Scheele, but historians believe
that at some point he may have married an
Maximillian Schele de Vere
56
Irishwoman named Maud De Vere. He changed
his surname and moved to Philadelphia, where
he edited a German-­language weekly for a few
years before being invited in 1844 to join the
faculty of the University of Virginia. One of his
letters of recommendation came from Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow.
On Grounds, Schele De Vere taught Anglo-­
Saxon, French, German, Spanish, and Italian, as
well as European political history and literature.
He proved to be a popular teacher, and someone described him as a Swede by birth and
a Prussian by allegiance, but a Frenchman in
appearance. When he wasn’t lecturing, Schele
De Vere was an indefatigable writer, publishing
translations, textbooks, histories, and essays. He
authored books on the French verb, the Roman
empress Agrippina the Younger, and magic.
In 1878, Schele De Vere compiled Students
of the University of Virginia, a resource that
includes the names of every visitor and rector, every member of the faculty, and, after
fifty-­three years of classes at the University,
every student. Moreover, it lists the years each
student attended, his birthplace, his profession, and his place of residence. To offer one
example: Robert Lewis Dabney, that young
man who described so affectingly the death of
Professor John A. G. Davis, received a master
of arts, went on to serve in the Confederate
army, and taught at Union Theological Seminary. (He would eventually die in Austin, Texas,
in 1898, after a later life spent railing against
the Confederate defeat.)
his colleagues and students a silver punch bowl
and matching ladle. A year later, however, he
was forced to resign. Apparently he had been
taking morphine for a bad back, which may
have contributed to two letters he wrote to
fellow faculty members that were deemed to
have been libelous. He moved to Washington,
D.C., and died there in May 1898.
Schele De Vere celebrated his fiftieth anniversary at the University in 1894, receiving from
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23
I
VARSITY HALL
n part, Thomas Jefferson’s spacious design
for the University of Virginia—spreading
out structures instead of jamming students
and faculty into a few cramped buildings—was
intended to be a disease-­prevention measure. It was a good idea, but unfortunately not
completely effective: in 1857, typhoid struck
Grounds, killing 14 of 633 students and at least
2 slaves. In response to the outbreak, classes
were briefly suspended, dormitories on the
East and West Ranges cleaned and renovated,
and cattle, horses, and hogs prohibited from
grazing on the Lawn. And on June 30, the
Board of Visitors appropriated $7,500 “that an
Infirmary [might] be erected & furnished.”
The Retreat for the Sick Students, or what is
now known as Varsity Hall, opened the following year. It was designed by William A. Pratt,
an English-­born architect and engineer who,
years earlier, had abandoned those fields in
pursuit of a new calling: photography. In 1844,
he opened the Virginia Skylight Daguerrean
Gallery at the Sign of the Gothic Window on
Main Street in Richmond. There he pioneered
various exposure techniques and went on to
create approximately thirty-­five thousand portraits, include two of Edgar Allan Poe. As business began to wane, however, Pratt returned
to his former profession, and the University of
Virginia hired him as its first superintendent of
buildings and grounds.
The Italianate building he designed and
constructed featured innovative ventilation
and heating systems that appeared to follow,
with respect to its patients, Florence Nightingale’s “first canon of nursing”: “To keep the air
58
he breathes as pure as the external air, without
chilling him.” Historical preservationists who
completed a renovation of the building in 2007
believe it to be the nation’s earliest college
campus infirmary. Pratt also designed a university chapel to stand at the south end of the
Lawn, opposite the Rotunda, but it was never
built.
and—very briefly—the Frank Batten School of
Leadership and Public Policy. In 2005, the University, then planning to expand Rouss Hall for
the McIntire School of Commerce, flirted with
the idea of tearing it down. Instead, engineers
actually moved the six-­hundred-­ton building 185 feet to its current location on Hospital
Drive.
Construction of a university hospital in 1900
forced a repurposing of the infirmary building, and in the hundred-­plus years since, it
has housed the Delta Tau Delta fraternity,
nursing-­student dormitories, Air Force ROTC,
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24
B
BOHN’S ALBUM
efore the Corks and Curls yearbook was
first published in 1888, students could
purchase an ornate, gold leaf autograph book
like this one from 1859. Produced by Casimir
Bohn, a German-­born lithographer based in
Washington, D.C., it is properly titled Bohn’s
Album and Autographs of the University of
Virginia: with a Short History, and Beautifully
Illustrated with Twenty Steel Engravings and
Portraits of the Professors and Officers. And
indeed it features a number of excellent portraits, including those of John B. Minor, William
Holmes McGuffey, and J. L. Cabell, as well as
Dr. John Staige Davis, son of the murdered
John A. G. Davis and uncle of Caroline Preston
Davis, whose “Pass Certificate” in mathematics
would be the source of no little controversy in
1893.
Another notable aspect of the 1859 album is
Bohn’s lithograph of Grounds. The viewer will
observe the Lawn and its surrounding pavilions,
the East and West Ranges, and the surrounding mountains and countryside. What, though,
is the problem with the Rotunda? It is clearly
out of proportion with its surroundings, drawn
not as it exists in life but as it exists, perhaps,
in fond memory. It towers, and even more
oddly, appears to have a tail protruding from
its north facade. This tail is what was known
as the Annex, commissioned by the University
in 1850 in response to increasing enrollment.
The architect Robert Mills had already begun
work on the Washington Monument when he
took on the task of more than doubling the size
of the Rotunda. He completed the Annex in
1853, and the next year members of the faculty
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61
dedicated a French-­made copy of Raphael’s
School of Athens, which was duly hung in the
building’s new 1,200‑seat auditorium.
Philosophy, Poetry, Theology, and Law are
each represented in the famous Renaissance
painting, and once the copy was installed it
must have seemed—what with those columns
everywhere and now Socrates and Aristotle—
that classical antiquity was inescapable on
Grounds.
Most of the pages of Bohn’s Album were
blank, intended for the scribblings of students
such as Launcelot Minor Blackford and his
friend Alexander Swift Pendleton. In Pendle­
ton’s 1859 album, Blackford inscribed the
following words from 1 Corinthians (in Greek):
“Hold fast in the faith, be ye manly, be ye
strong. May love be with you in Jesus Christ.”
This was the sort of romantic sentiment common to educated young men on the eve of war.
Both Lanty and Sandie (as they were respectively known) joined the Rockbridge Artillery
after Virginia seceded. “Examine everything,”
Pendleton wrote in Blackford’s 1860 album,
quoting 1 Thessalonians (also in Greek), “and
hold fast to the beautiful.”
Portrait of John B. Minor from Bohn’s Album
Portrait of John A. G. Davis from Bohn’s Album
62
I
t is unclear whether this kit, held today in
the School of Medicine’s archives, was used
by doctors at the University of Virginia during
the Civil War. But one like it would have been
available to physicians at the time, mostly to
control swelling of the brain from head wounds
sustained in battle. The tools here with the
black handles would have been screwed into
the head of a patient and used to remove a
piece of skull.
The one doing that screwing may well have
been Dr. J. L. Cabell, who during the Civil War
was a professor of medicine at the University
of Virginia and who superintended military
hospitals in Charlottesville and Danville. Cabell attended the University and in 1837, not
yet twenty-­four years old, was invited to join
the faculty. If there were grumblings about
his youth, they did not last, and in 1859 Dr.
Cabell published a book one recent historian
has described as “substantial”: The Testimony
of Modern Science to the Unity of Mankind.
Contrary to the prevailing belief of the era that
“inferior races” must have been separately created, it argues that all humans were brought
forth at the same time.
CIVIL WAR
TREPANNING KIT
Cabell’s Charlottesville military hospital opened in July 1861, in time to treat the
wounded from Manassas, and served about
22,700 patients during the war. Many of these
soldiers stayed on Grounds—in hotels on the
East and West Ranges, in the well-­ventilated
and properly heated infirmary, and, on a few
desperate occasions, in the Rotunda itself. After the Battle of Port Republic on June 9, 1862,
the sick and injured nearly overwhelmed the
63
25
University’s facilities, forcing hospital officials to
pitch tents on the Lawn.
While faculty members, who largely supported the Confederacy, did their best to be
tolerant in the face of the influx, they were, in
fact, still trying to teach classes. On July 25,
1862, the Board of Visitors demanded that the
government in Richmond order the removal of
all patients from Grounds, reimburse the University for damages that included bloodstains
on the Rotunda floor, and pay back rent. One
of their not-­unreasonable concerns was that
Union troops might burn the University should
they determine its facilities had been used for
military purposes.
By 1863, just forty-­six students were enrolled
in classes, and the visitors had to work hard
to keep those few from being drafted. Officials complained about dormitories being left
open—“in the precise condition in which they
were left by the soldiers”—and littered with
straw, making them “peculiarly liable to fire.”
There were broken windows, too, and cows
had gone back to grazing on the Lawn.
The facilities were falling apart but at least
the University was presumed to be out of the
way of the Yankees.
It wasn’t, however.
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65
26
“R
umors thicken as to the enemy’s approach,” the law professor John B.
Minor noted in a diary entry dated March 1,
1865. Until this point, and with the exception
of a negligible skirmish on nearby Rio Hill,
the shooting part of the Civil War had steered
clear of Grounds. That was about to change,
however. The next day, having received news of
a Confederate defeat at Waynesboro and with
a biblical rain pouring down outside, Minor
wrote, “Nothing intervenes now between us
and the Yankees, but the mud.”
And while the mud was thick—up to his
JOHN B. MINOR’S stirrups,
one Union horseman complained—it
was
not
thick
enough to prevent the arrival on
DIARY
March 3 of George A. Custer with the Union
cavalry.
A small delegation of University officials,
including Minor, “repaired to the grounds
opposite Carr’s Hill . . . and there awaited the
enemy’s coming.” Representatives of Charlottesville had already arrived and displayed a flag
of truce. They did not meet Custer, but instead
were received by “a dirty-­looking lieutenant”
who promised to pass on their message “that
no defense of Charlottesville was contemplated, that the town was evacuated, and that
we requested protection for the University, and
for the town.”
Remarkably, considering the fiery fate of
the Virginia Military Institute the year before
and the University of Alabama a month later,
they received it. Custer and his superior, Philip
Henry Sheridan, arranged for the posting of a
guard at the Lawn, and while their men torched
66
the local uniform manufactory, the Academical
Village lay undisturbed.
Early on Saturday morning Minor received
word from the University’s rector, Thomas L.
Preston, that he (the rector) had been robbed
of a watch and money and that his house had
been looted. “The little girl who brought me
the note,” Minor wrote, “tells me several of his
servant boys have gone off and have betrayed
all his horses to the enemy.” In fact, the memoirs of Union soldiers indicate that hundreds of
enslaved men, women, and children—hungry
for freedom and eager to help the Union war
effort—ran away and followed the army south
to Scottsville. Minor’s diary largely ignores this,
but notes that “plunderers” also entered the
infirmary, no doubt hoping to benefit from its
central heating system. Minor arranged for a
more vigilant guard.
By Sunday, the cavalrymen began riding
in the direction of Scottsville, and the losses
to the University proper were tallied at two
horses, one slave, and the cannon on Observatory Mountain. Things could have been much
worse. “We hear of many losses and insults suffered by our neighbors,” Minor wrote on March
7, “and have reason to be devoutly thankful
that we were ourselves protected perfectly
from insult, and to a great extent, from injury.”
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27
T
SAMUEL MILLER’S
CHAIR
his chair belonged to Samuel Miller, who,
according to Virginia: A Hand-­book,
published in 1893, “was born in almost abject
poverty in a log cabin upon the top of one of
the ragged mountains of Albemarle county,
Virginia, on the 30th day of June, 1792.” A
character straight out of the books of Horatio
Alger Jr., Miller went on to become a wealthy
merchant and tobacco trader. Shortly before
his death in 1869, he created a $100,000 trust
to launch the University of Virginia’s agricultural
program, which—because the University was
not interested in having an agricultural program—was quickly converted into the School
of Biology. Miller left the majority of his estate
to the establishment of what is now called
Miller School of Albemarle, one of the nation’s
oldest coeducational boarding schools.
Miller is one of several figures connected to
the University and its history through unusual
largesse. After working as a tobacco trader in
Lynchburg with his brother, he fell ill in 1829
and, according to his obituary, “retired to his
country seat four miles from [Lynchburg], where
he has continued to reside ever since. He has
lived there entirely alone with the exception of
a few servants.” When his brother died in 1841,
Miller inherited a six-­figure fortune and managed to turn that into several million dollars
by the time of his own death in 1869, making
him, in the estimation of one newspaper, the
wealthiest man in Virginia.
Miller’s will endowed the Lynchburg Female
Orphan Asylum and, in Albemarle County,
the Miller Manual-­Labor School, which would
68
operate on the reformist principle that students
should work for their educations. While the will
did not mention the University of Virginia, by
June 27, 1870, Miller’s estate had “respectfully
requested” that the Board of Visitors “provide
for the complete organization of the School
of Agriculture,” soon to become the School
of Biology. The gift—among the first of any
significant size in the school’s history—came
at a crucial moment for the University as it attempted to recover from the upheaval of the
Civil War. Enrollment had fallen so low that
the visitors took to posting advertisements
in national papers emphasizing the fact that
both the nephew of Union general John Pope
and two nephews of Confederate president
Jefferson Davis were attending classes at the
University.
By 1872, the Staunton Spectator had announced on its front page that the University
“is rapidly regaining the popularity and prosperity it enjoyed before the war,” taking special
note of Samuel Miller’s substantial gift and the
newly created “school of natural history and
agriculture.”
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28
T
THE UNIVERSITY
MEMORIAL
he student body of the University of Virginia in 1860–­61 strongly favored secession, going so far as to break into the Rotunda
and, even before Virginia’s departure from the
Union was official, raise the Confederate national flag. (They had to saw through five doors
in order to do it, according to one participant’s
recollection, “not without risk of a fatal fall.”)
When war did come, most students promptly
enrolled into Confederate service—something
like 515 out of 600, in fact. Another 2,481 of the
school’s approximately 8,000 living alumni also
served the Confederacy, while only a handful
joined the other side.
Histories tend not to mention the ones who
fought for the Union, men such as Bernard G.
Farrar Jr., a Saint Louis native who attended the
University in 1850–­51 and rose to the rank of
brevet brigadier general of the U.S. Volunteers;
or Charles H. McElroy, of Fincastle, who fought
in the Ninety-­sixth Ohio Infantry Regiment; or
John Thornley, of Caroline County, who was
commissioned a U.S. Navy surgeon. They represent a tiny minority, after all, and in the ashes
of bitter defeat, with more than six hundred
thousand young men dead and in the ground,
a different kind of memory asserted itself, one
in which glorious legions in gray fell bravely in
service of the Lost Cause. This is the story put
forth in John Lipscomb Johnson’s The University Memorial, published in 1871.
A Spotsylvania native and 1860 graduate
of the University, Johnson had served as a
Confederate chaplain during the war. In the
years following the surrender at Appomattox
he set about collecting biographical sketches
70
would hesitate to die. As the martyr sets his
face towards Jerusalem, so this hero, dying for
the faith of his fathers, turns his face upon the
South.”
of University of Virginia alumni who had died
fighting for the Confederacy, men such as John
Y. Beall. Convicted of spying, Beall—a Virginia
native who had attended the University from
1852 to 1855—was sentenced to hang despite convincing arguments that he had not,
in fact, been spying. Ninety-­two members of a
Republican-­controlled Congress even signed
a petition calling for his pardon. On February 24, 1865, Beall stood atop the gallows in
New York. According to Johnson’s Memorial: “His face is turned upon his own beloved
South. Far over waters, mountains, valleys,
and intervening hills, through the deep azure
sky travel his thoughts to the land of chivalrous deeds and political ideas, which, rightly
understood, gather in their scope the eternal
years of God’s own truth, and for which no man
The almost eight hundred pages of the
Memorial exemplify how critical it was to Virginians of the time to find and preserve even
the smallest portion of dignity. Beall had what
was called a Good Death. According to tradition, such an end was prepared for, witnessed,
and somehow marked, usually by last words.
(Beall’s: “I protest against this execution. It is
absolute murder—brutal murder. I die in the
service and defence of my country.”) What the
horrors of the Civil War battlefield so often
denied, Johnson’s Memorial provided: the opportunity for a Good Death, for meaning in the
face of obliteration.
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29
T
his woolly mammoth, constructed of
cardboard and paint by a group of students in 2012, is a full-­sized replica of a plaster
mammoth that once towered over the interior of Brooks Hall. The idea of the so‑called
Cardboard Company, led by artist-­in‑residence
Tom Burckhardt, was to whimsically recreate
the natural history museum that had made its
home in Brooks Hall before, in the 1940s, going the way of that mammoth. The museum,
christened the Lewis Brooks Hall of Natural
Science, opened on June 27, 1878, and its two
stories were crammed with tens of thousands
of specimens and artifacts, “a full procession of
life through the ages,” according to a reporter
from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine. That
same article took particular note of “the great
Siberian mammoth” in the museum’s central
area.
BROOKS HALL
MAMMOTH
The creature stood an imposing sixteen-­and-­
a-­half feet tall and more than forty-­nine feet
around the body. True, it was just plaster and
fake hair, but still. Where did it come from, and
how did it happen to be at the University of Virginia, in the anomalously Gothic Brooks Hall?
So out of place is the building that rumors have
long circulated that its architect accidentally
sent to Virginia plans intended for one of the
Ivy League schools.
What happened was Henry Ward. A naturalist, a respected scholar, and a dedicated
artifact collector, Ward was someone who
scoured the country and the world for old fossils, dinosaur skeletons, buffalo heads—whatever he could get his hands on—and then
sold them to museums. And when museums
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73
weren’t purchasing, he conspired to build
new ones that would. This is how he came to
know the mysterious Lewis Brooks, of Rochester, New York, a wealthy textile manufacturer
with an interest in natural science who, at the
time of his death in 1877, had no wife and no
heirs. After failing to negotiate a donation from
Brooks to the Smithsonian Institution, Ward
managed instead to direct his gift of $45,000
to the University of Virginia, which agreed to
build a museum in the donor’s name and use
it to house Ward’s artifacts, which included the
plaster mammoth.
According to the anthropological archaeologist Jeffrey Hantman, the placement of Brooks
Hall was less odd then than it may seem now
because at the time it was built it aligned with
the Annex, which protruded from the north
end of the Rotunda. “Further,” writes Hantman,
“the alignment of the Rotunda, Brooks Hall
and the Chapel can be thought of in richly symbolic terms,” with the Rotunda library—seat of
all knowledge—in the center, and religion and
natural science on either side.
One imagines Thomas Jefferson would have
approved, and as it happens, Brooks Hall’s
front door faces directly toward Monticello.
The original Brooks Hall mammoth
74
Brooks Hall
75
30
T
his handsome edition of McGuffey’s
Fourth Eclectic Reader, published in
1879 and originally owned by the poet Vachel
Lindsay, represents one in a series of six public-­
school textbooks widely used in nineteenthand twentieth-­century America. In fact, it was
omnipresent—or, as the Reader’s “Exercises in
Articulation” might teach:
I ncorrect
Om’pres’nt
MCGUFFEY’S
FOURTH
ECLECTIC
READER
C orrect
Om-­ni-­present
Its author, William Holmes McGuffey, was an
educational reformer who hailed from western
Pennsylvania. In 1826, he joined the faculty of
Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, and a few
years later was ordained a Presbyterian minister. In 1836 he became president of Cincinnati
College, and three years after that, of Ohio
University. When George Tucker retired in 1845,
the University of Virginia required a new professor of moral philosophy, and found its man in
McGuffey. He stayed on until his death in 1873.
By contrast to Tucker, whose kin had long
been powerful and wealthy men in Virginia
and who became, later in his career, a fierce
opponent of abolitionism, McGuffey was the
product of a Midwestern reform movement
that promoted public education, women’s
rights, temperance, pacifism, religious revival,
poverty relief, and the end of slavery. Though
McGuffey was by no means an abolitionist
himself—his enslaved servant in Pavilion IX was
named William Gibbons—he still signed on
to an up-­by-­the-­bootstraps approach to social
mobility dramatized on page 47 of McGuffey’s
Reader: “Where There Is a Will There Is a Way.”
76
New Hampshire, the other from Georgia, think
instead of a day’s work missed, of wife and
child, and of “daylight’s soft surprise.”
In this perhaps less-­than-­plausible passage,
a ten-­year-­old boy is overcome with longing
for a grammar book, and he shovels snow in
order to earn the money to buy one. “From
that time, Henry was always the first in all his
classes. He knew no such word as fail.” Other
stories dramatize the Sermon on the Mount
and suggest that generosity is its own reward,
while on page 230 readers find “The Dying
Soldiers,” a long poem that stands in contrast
to the Lost Cause sentiments espoused by The
University Memorial. Rather than reflect on glorious abstractions, these dying men, one from
In McGuffey’s Fourth Eclectic Reader, the
soldiers ponder their own deaths in completely
different terms from those of John Y. Beall
about to hang:
“Our time is short,” one faint voice said;
“Today we’ve done our best
On different sides: what matters now?
To-­morrow we shall rest!”
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31
B
FIRST EDITION
OF CORKS AND
CURLS
y 1888 there were fourteen fraternities
on Grounds, two debating and literary
societies, a temperance union, and even something called the D. K. E. Goober Pea Club. Student pastimes had expanded beyond rioting
and the occasional aggravated assault, and for
this reason J. H. C. Bagby took it upon himself
to found an annual yearbook, that student life
at the University of Virginia might be more
properly chronicled. What, though, to call it?
Bagby and his mustachioed staff—consisting
of one representative each from the fourteen
fraternities—proclaimed a contest, and the
winner was a Phi Kappa Psi man and the future
Episcopal bishop of Long Island, Ernest M.
Stires. He dubbed it Corks and Curls.
Bagby and staff promptly launched another
contest, this one to explain what their new title
meant. The winner of that contest was said to
be a medical student named Leander Fogg,
who proclaimed that a cork was an unprepared
student while a curl was an ace, someone who
had it all figured out. Whatever the case, “The
title thus chosen was a happy one,” a later editor declared. “Unique, indigenous, esoteric,
it is full of meaning for the elect, while at the
same time it piques the curiosity of the uninitiated.”
A short history of Corks and Curls, produced
by the Rare Book School in 2004, suggests that
the staff did a fine job of covering sports—in
1912 the yearbook featured photos of each of
the football team’s players, to the exclusion
of any other students. Its social evolution was
slow: the 1890 volume openly mocked “characters of the negro race,” while the 1963 edition
78
declined to acknowledge an appearance on
Grounds that year by Martin Luther King Jr.
When the University first became fully coeducational in 1970, one of its first female undergraduates, writing in Corks and Curls, declared
that “Virginia has a new face, new legs, a new
body, but most importantly, a new mind.” By
1975 the staff had elected its first female editor.
Corks and Curls endured until 2008, when
debts forced it to shut down, but was revived
in 2015 with funds from yearbook alumni. As
for this, the annual’s first volume, it offers its
readers pleasant memories of the year gone
by and an only possibly sarcastic appreciation
of the ways in which the curls of the University’s
classes had been nurtured and the corks ruthlessly dispatched. “See what a truly beautiful
system this is,” the editors write. “The strong is
encouraged to become stronger, and the weak
to become weaker; ‘to him that hath much is
given, and from him that hath not is taken away
even that he hath.’ ”
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32
T
he University of Virginia’s school colors in
the years following the Civil War were silver gray and cardinal red, intending, the newspaper College Topics explained in 1904, to
represent the gray of the Confederacy “dyed
in blood.” Opposing sides in the Civil War still
mattered greatly, and by 1888 so did sports.
That’s when a student meeting in the Annex
was called to address a problem with the existing colors: they did not adequately stand out
on muddy football fields.
SILK
HANDKERCHIEF
“Mr. Allen Potts, one of the University’s earliest athletic heroes, had attended the meeting
in his football clothes,” College Topics wrote,
“being on his way to the field for the afternoon’s practice.” (The squad went 2–­1 that
year, losing its first-­ever intercollegiate game
to Johns Hopkins, 26–­0.) Wrapped around
Potts’s neck was “a very large silk handkerchief, striped navy blue and orange.” He had
acquired it during a trip to Oxford University,
where certain foppish students wore such
things in place of belts. Somebody sitting behind Potts “reached over and pulled the handkerchief from his neck and waving it yelled,
‘How will these colors do?’ ”
The crowd approved, and in this way orange
and blue became the University’s athletic colors, more or less officially.
The football team, no longer so closely associated with a Lost Cause, so to speak, continued to improve. The Orange and Blue posted
a winning record every year until 1916, even
going 8–­0 versus Virginia Tech until a particularly controversial game in 1904. That’s when
Tech’s eighth-­year senior, Hunter Carpenter,
80
Whatever was done, it wasn’t enough, and
the eighteen-­year-­old died the next day. It was
the third death or serious injury among college football players that year, and many were
calling into question the sport’s safety and
even moral propriety. The former Confederate
guerrilla John Singleton Mosby, a University of
Virginia alumnus and then seventy-­five years
old, actually called the sport “murder.” (The
historian John S. Watterson comments on the
irony of this, considering that Mosby had been
expelled from school for shooting a fellow student in the neck.) In subsequent years, the University’s president Edwin Anderson Alderman
worked with, among others, his friend Woodrow Wilson at Princeton to revise the rules of
football in hopes of making play safer.
refused to sign an affidavit denying he played
professionally. University of Virginia officials,
meanwhile, refused to certify the eligibility of
a star transfer from Columbia. (Actually, the
“transfer” had flunked out.) Once the game
got underway, more than a few punches were
thrown and Carpenter was ejected, but Tech
still prevailed, 11–­0. The teams didn’t play
again for eighteen years.
Then, on November 13, 1909, tragedy struck.
With Virginia leading 21–­0 in the second half
at Georgetown, first-­year half-­back Archer
Christian took a handoff and cut right, running smack into the defensive line. When the
big bodies finally lifted themselves off the pile,
Christian lay motionless. Trainers carried him
from the field and, according to one account,
he was heard to say, “I’m suffering. Please do
something for me.”
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33
T
GRADUATION
INVITATION
his bulky invitation to “the exercises of
commencement week” for 1892 suggests
that graduation was an even more important
event then than now. In the second volume of
Corks and Curls, an editor describes the occasion from a few years earlier, in 1888, when
President Grover Cleveland came to Grounds.
This marked the first time a sitting president
had addressed students at the University of
Virginia, and the editor gushed that “mere
words . . . are too inadequate by far” to convey
the occasion’s excitement.
The president arrived on Wednesday, June
27, to a crowd of several thousand, “packed
like sardines on the lawn.” After degrees had
been conferred and a speech delivered by
Grover Cleveland
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83
Commencement festivities had actually begun several days earlier, with a brief ceremony
on Sunday evening. On Monday morning came
the first german, or dance, which included girls
and flirting, and was capped off that evening
by speeches from members of the Washington
Society. “The lawn,” meanwhile, “was brilliantly
lighted by electricity, and grotesque chinese
lanterns of all shapes and sizes hung in the
foliage or rose one above another in beautiful
pyramids.”
some lesser figure, “Old Grover” and a lucky
few hundred retired to the library, where—according to the Corks and Curls editor—he
“and all his cabinet were unanimously elected
honorary or honored alumni, I have now forgotten which.” As for Cleveland, the New York
Times quotes him as saying: “I wonder how
much attention is paid to politics here by the
students and Alumni. We hear a great deal
about the student in politics. As to whether it
is a good or a bad thing depends much on the
student. I should say that if he were a student
of politics it would be a very good thing.”
On Tuesday morning, a senator from Indiana
pontificated on the subject of the University’s
founder, followed by more dancing and then
more oratory, this time from the Jefferson Society. On Wednesday, after the president had returned to Washington, the final ball convened
in the library. “The floor was like glass,” our
reporter tells us, “the music was enchanting,
and the girls!—the mere sight of them was to
be madly in love with twenty at a time.”
From the Rotunda President Cleveland traveled up the mountain to Monticello. According to Corks and Curls, “Governor [Fitzhugh]
Lee”—who, it was true, carried some extra
weight on him—“offered to sit on an unfortunate politician, of whom the President was very
much afraid, and so terrified the offender by
the threat that he has not been seen since.”
Final Exercises at the University of Virginia
84
A
s Corks and Curls reported, in 1970 the
University of Virginia had “new legs [and]
a new body,” by which the publication meant
that women had, for the first time, enrolled as
undergraduates under the same conditions as
men. These were not the first women students,
however, as this diploma, awarded to Caroline
Preston Davis and dated June 14, 1893, suggests.
To be accurate, it’s not a diploma but a “Pass
Certificate.” And even the decision to award
those to women was quickly rescinded by the
Board of Visitors, which at this point in its history demonstrated no interest whatsoever in
new legs and a new body.
PASS
CERTIFICATE
OF CAROLINE
PRESTON DAVIS
In this respect, the visitors were behind the
times. Colleges and universities in the United
States had been admitting women alongside
men since the opening of Oberlin College in
1837, and by the 1890s, about two-­thirds of
American universities were coeducational. This
put pressure on public institutions such as the
University of Virginia to address why they didn’t
accept women. Nothing in the act that had
chartered the University in 1819 limited enrollment to men, but when a faculty committee
considered opening a coordinate college for
women in 1880, the idea was voted down.
Then, in 1892, Caroline Preston Davis boldly
petitioned the University for admission. The
historical record says little of Davis, who at the
time was about twenty-­seven years old, but it’s
interesting that she was the granddaughter of
the murdered law professor John A. G. Davis,
the daughter of an alumnus (the Reverend
Richard Terrell Davis, known during the late war
85
34
as the “Fighting Parson”), and the niece, on
her father’s side, of three more alumni, including Professor John Staige Davis. She was not a
nobody, in other words, and when they met on
June 27 the visitors seemed at pains to accommodate her request. They decided that while
it would be “impracticable and inexpedient”
to get into the business of educating “young
ladies,” it would be “practicable and expedient” to bend the rules where (white) women
of “good character” were concerned. As long
as they showed “adequate preparation” and
paid the same fees as other students receiving
actual diplomas and attending lectures, such
women would be allowed to study privately
with a professor and, upon passing his examination, receive a certificate.
Davis accepted these terms and the next
year passed her mathematics test—the same
one given to male students—with distinction.
Few if any other women followed her lead, and
in the end it hardly mattered, because in 1894
the faculty and visitors changed their minds.
The professors cited, among other reasons,
their concern that the demands of learning
might “physically unsex” women, causing them
to have problems giving birth. The visitors,
meanwhile, declared that while they were “in
full sympathy with the movement looking to
the higher education of women,” the University didn’t have “the proper facilities to furnish
them such advantages.” That would take another seven and a half decades.
86
87
35
T
KEY TO THE
ROTUNDA
he tone of the first number of Corks and
Curls is such a tangle of sincerity and
sarcasm that it is difficult to be certain what
the yearbook’s editorial perspective actually
was. For instance, the book features an essay
by Leander Fogg, identified as a medical student, on the meaning of “corks” and “curls”
that ventures so far into the ridiculous that at
least one history has suggested that Fogg was
nothing more than “a playful pseudonym created by the editors.” And in fact, no student
by that name was enrolled in 1887 or 1888. The
editors write, nevertheless, that Fogg, for his
essay, was awarded a “chromo-­lithograph of
Henry Martin, the janitor, and two moot-­court
ballots.”
Henry Martin
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89
Was it a joke that a student should receive the portrait of a janitor, and an African American janitor at that? It is, however,
true that Henry Martin was a well-­known and
well-­liked figure on Grounds, cleaning rooms
and ringing the bell (which marked time on
Grounds) for decades, until 1909. As part of
his responsibilities, he held keys to all of the
University’s buildings, and in June 1895 he
presented to Louis S. Greene, as a graduation present, this original key to the Rotunda,
which he had carried for thirty years. In 1949,
Greene’s son gave the key, and a note telling
its history, to President Colgate W. Darden.
Martin was born into slavery at Monticello,
later giving his birthdate as the day of Thomas
Jefferson’s death, July 4, 1826. His ownership
soon transferred to the Carr family, which operated various plantations as well as a boardinghouse on Carr’s Hill. This is likely how Martin
first came into contact with the University.
During the Civil War, he assisted Dr. J. L. Cabell
in caring for Confederate wounded, and in an
interview published in 1914, he recalled the
eerie silence of soldiers lying in the Rotunda:
“It didn’t make no difference how much they
was sufferin’, they didn’t make no noise. No,
sir, they lay right still, a-­lookin’ straight up at
the ceilin’.” Martin first appears in University
records in 1866, having been paid to haul coal;
that same year he was paid to ring the bell in
the Rotunda. He eventually learned to read
and write, and according to one professor he
rarely forgot the name or face of a student
over the course of more than fifty years. With
affection, but also patronizingly, students called
him Uncle Henry.
It’s not possible to know whether Leander
Fogg was real, nor whether he won a lithograph
of Henry Martin. It is, however, possible to see
the way in which Uncle Henry existed for white
members of the University community: something of a mascot, something of a joke, always
loyal. He “knew his part in life and played it
well,” Professor David M. R. Culbreth III wrote
in a 1908 history of the University. He “fully
recognized that he was neither a professor, a
student, nor a white man.” He was, in Culbreth’s
estimation, just a bell-­ringer, and “to serve was
his delight”—a faithful slave, in other words.
It is in honor of this fraught legacy that the
University of Virginia laid a plaque near the
chapel in 2012. Martin, it reads, “was beloved
by generations of faculty, students, and alumni,
and he remembered them all when they returned for visits.”
90
Henry Martin included this note when he gifted his original key to the Rotunda
to Louis S. Greene in 1895
91
36
T
BUST OF
JOHN B. MINOR
his marble bust of John B. Minor, now displayed in the law school library, was presented to the law professor on June 12, 1895,
in honor of his fifty years of teaching at the
University of Virginia. According to one history,
the bust was “placed in a conspicuous position
in the Library,” at that time located in the Rotunda, and although a small ceremony included
“suitable addresses,” Professor Minor’s poor
health prevented his attendance. He died just
a few weeks later, on July 29. As for the bust,
it was saved from the Great Fire that October,
perhaps because it was so conspicuous.
Minor was born in Louisa County on June 2,
1813, and received his law degree from the
University of Virginia in 1834. When Henry
St. George Tucker left the University in 1845,
­Minor stepped in as law professor.
“The University of Virginia, at this time, was
languishing under a cloud, owing to the disgraceful riot which had recently occurred,” the
historian Philip Alexander Bruce writes. “There
was then less to tempt the lawyer in full practice to consent to take the position vacated by
Tucker than at any time since the establishment
of the school. It was fortunate that this should
have been so, for, in Minor, the institution secured for its Faculty a man, who, although not
yet enrolled among the greatest members of
92
the profession in Virginia, was destined to become the greatest teacher of the law that the
State of his nativity, perhaps the entire South,
has produced.”
By some accounts Minor, though proslavery,
was a Unionist in 1861, and he was less than
pleased when students raised a Confederate
flag from the Rotunda. “We watched for him
when he came out of his house to go to lecture,” one recalled, “for nothing could induce
him to come out to look at that flag. But on his
way to lecture he could not help himself. ‘Oh!
Mr. Minor, do look at that beautiful flag!’ ”
The professor glanced up once, briefly, only
to be heard muttering under his breath: “Flag
of my country, can it be / That in thy place a rag
I see.”
As with many in those days, Minor’s sympathies changed, and his diary recounts the
efforts he made on behalf of the University
in 1865. In the years that followed he solidified his legal reputation with the publication
of Institutes of Common and Statute Law
(1875), a book that, in the judgment of Senator John Warwick Daniel, “contains more law
in fewer words than any work with which I am
acquainted.”
93
“I
never saw a more magnificent or more
awful sight than when the dome caught
fire,” twelve-­year-­old Bell Dunnington wrote in
a letter to her sister. “All the top part of it was
one terrible, glowing mass of flame, and the tin
had a curious reddish look, though it did not
blaze, but wrinkled up.”
37
HOLSINGER
PHOTOGRAPH OF
THE ROTUNDA
FIRE
It was October 27, 1895, a Sunday. As students and locals emerged from church services
that morning they heard the University’s bell
clanging urgently, and hurried to the Lawn.
Rufus W. Holsinger, a Pennsylvania Quaker who
had moved to Charlottesville late in the 1880s
and operated a portrait studio on West Main
Street, quickly lugged his cumbersome equipment onto Grounds. There he perfectly captured the moment Bell Dunnington described.
Or at least, it appears as if he did so. In actuality, Holsinger photographed the Rotunda after
the fire had done its worst, and then doctored
the negative with artful scratches to give the
impression of flames and smoke. Despite or
perhaps because of this fiction, the photograph has become almost as iconic as the
event itself.
The historian Philip Alexander Bruce, not
given to understatement, likened the blaze
to the Great Fire in Rome during the reign of
Nero, or the Great Fire in London back in the
days of Charles II: an event “so far beyond the
utmost sweep of the normal course of events;
it was so sudden, so unexpected, so startling
in its occurrence; so destructive in its physical
consequences; so far reaching in its moral influence,—that it can, with perfect accuracy, be
taken as a milestone to mark the close of one
period and the opening of another.”
94
Or, in the words of another, more plain­
spoken witness: “Horrible! Horrible! Horrible!”
It began not on Grounds but elsewhere in
Charlottesville, where early that morning an
electric cable car broke free of its shed, causing
one of its cables to hit an electric line. A surge,
which cut power to parts of the city for nearly
an hour, traveled down West Main Street and
into the wiring of the Rotunda Annex, sparking
a small fire.
Law student Walter Scott Hancock was
“stark naked” and taking a sponge bath when
he heard his landlady cry, “Fire!” He made it
outside at about 10:30 and, by his recollection,
“found the fire serious indeed. The rear end
of the Annex near the roof was smoking & the
flames had just burst out.” John T. Thornton,
the twenty-­year-­old son of the faculty chairman, was on the Lawn, too, and later recalled
how “no water could be gotten as high as the
flames, only a miserable little stream.”
In anticipation that the fire would jump from
the Annex to the Rotunda, the crowd pitched
in to empty the buildings of its many valuables.
“When I got to the Library all the pictures of
importance had been moved,” Hancock wrote.
“The bust of Grand old John B. had been carried out & the pedestal was being removed.” A
statue of Thomas Jefferson by A. T. Galt, given
to the University in 1861, was lowered down
from its fiery perch using ropes and a mattress,
while books were carried out under arms and
in skirts. Back in the Annex, meanwhile, every
effort was made to save the copy of Raphael’s
School of Athens that hung in the auditorium.
Rescuers “had it all undone but one corner,”
Bell Dunnington wrote, “when they were
obliged to go and leave it. We were all so sorry
they did not tear it and bring what they could,
for only a little corner would have been lost.”
More than 60 percent of the library’s estimable collection went up in flames, but it was only
a small portion of all that was lost that day.
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38
T
his souvenir of the Great Fire of October 27, 1895, is a fragment of one of the
Rotunda’s original capitals. Made of Carrara
marble, this and other remnants from the blaze
were used as models for new Italian-­carved
capitals that are part of the Rotunda renovation
completed in 2016.
FRAGMENT
OF ORIGINAL
CAPITAL OF THE
ROTUNDA
In 1895, though, it was destruction, not
reconstruction, that ruled the day—some of
it initiated intentionally. The historian Philip
Alexander Bruce gives an exciting account of
the heroic actions of mathematics professor
William H. Echols—also, interestingly, superintendent of buildings and grounds—during the
Rotunda fire. Upon hearing the fire bell, Echols
raced to the scene and clambered up a makeshift ladder, hose in hand, only to narrowly
escape being killed by a falling beam. According to Bruce, Echols then hatched an unlikely
plan: to save the Rotunda he would attempt to
destroy the portico that connected it with the
Annex.
Writes Bruce: “Professor Echols, having got
possession of one hundred pounds of dynamite, with the necessary fuses and caps, and
aided by Finch, a medical student, and Brune
and Bishop, University employees, was successful in bringing down pell-­mell a portion of
the intervening pillars; but the firm roof itself,
still upheld at one end by the Annex, and at
the other, by the Rotunda, remained in places
undamaged.”
What to do now? “The flames of the burning Annex were already licking the bridge; the
96
wind was blowing violently southward; and
in a brief time, the fire would leap across the
barrier.” Echols sent a medical student to town
for more explosives while he and his assistants
smashed through doors, pried into walls, and
worked their way up to the dome.
“Indifferent to the imminent peril of his position,” Bruce continues, “he, from a commanding point, coolly hurled a mass of dynamite,
fifty pounds in weight, upon the connecting
roof; and so terrific was the explosion which
followed that it was said to have been heard
fifteen miles away. The Rotunda rocked under
the concussion, the plaster fell from the ceiling of the dome, and every pane of glass, not
already broken, was shattered.”
It didn’t work—the Rotunda burned anyway.
In a 1905 essay written for the University of
Virginia Magazine, Morgan Poitiaux Robinson
recalled the quiet of that Sunday night. “When
the moon came out, as though to take a last
look at the pride of Jefferson’s latter days, it
was a ghastly and heart-­rending sight to see
the blackened walls and hollow windows, and
the tall, white pillars, with their marble capitals
all smoked up, standing as silent sentinels, on
the old portico . . .”
In the company of some friends, law student Walter Scott Hancock was gazing at the
moon as well, and wrote of how it “peeped
through the desolated columns.” He went on,
“We spoke of the Parthenon, the Pantheon; I
thought of the Colliseum & of Byron. We separated & the tragic day was done.”
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39
M
ORIGINAL PIECE
OF TIN ROOF
WITH PAINTING
emento ignis. Remember the fire. That’s
what an artist known only as Miss Shuey
was doing when she painted this image of the
Rotunda’s ruins following the Great Fire of October 27, 1895. This piece of tin was collected
by Shuey from those very ruins, transformed
into a canvas, and sold as a souvenir. Even
without that bit of historical gimmickry, though,
it is a lovely painting, suffused with hints of
daybreak and therefore hopeful in a way that
Rufus W. Holsinger’s more famous but also
more funereal black-­and-­whites are not.
Hope was necessary. The Rotunda, after
all, was the seat of reason and touchstone of
Thomas Jefferson’s original design. It had long
served as the neoclassical symbol of the University of Virginia’s greatness, and now it was
ruined.
“No time was lost in vain regrets,” the
historian John S. Patton, writing in 1906,
declared. Instead, everyone just got back to
work. Unbelievably, Monday lectures convened on schedule, despite the fact that the
now smoking hulk of the Annex had previously
been home to most of the University’s active classrooms. Space was cleared in Hotel B
(Washington Hall), on the East Range, and Hotel C (Jefferson Hall), on the West Range, and
classes met in Brooks Hall. The Board of Visitors, meanwhile, began to tally the costs, just
as they had following the Union occupation
three decades earlier. This time it much was
worse, though. Construction of the Rotunda
had cost about $60,000, while its clock and bell
and all the library’s books had come to more
than $100,000. The Annex and the much-­prized
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School of Athens had accounted for another
$61,000. Against that, funds on hand amounted
to about $50,000 from insurance and other
sources. The financial outlook was dire.
The post-­inferno University would be a different place physically—without the Annex,
with a slightly altered Rotunda, the south end
of the Lawn enclosed for the first time. But it
also would be different morally, Bruce wrote,
“for no seat of learning can pass successfully
through such a plunge into calamity without
emerging from the black waters into the sunshine with a spirit purified and lifted up by the
experience of adversity.”
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40
T
CAST PLASTER
ROSETTE FROM
STANFORD
WHITE
RENOVATION
his cast plaster rosette from the Rotunda
is as good a place to start as any post
ignem—after the fire. It comes from the renovation that began just three months after the
blaze, on January 18, 1896, when the University
hired the New York firm of McKim, Mead &
White to draw up plans for the new Rotunda
and a series of additional buildings. Led by the
noted architect Stanford White, the team replicated the Rotunda’s south facade facing the
Lawn, removed any trace of the Annex, and (to
grumbling from the faculty) slightly reimagined
the north side with a portico in the Beaux-­Arts
style for which White was renowned.
“The capitals,” the historian John S. Patton tells us, “remained for some years simple
blocks of Carrara marble, for lack of the means
to carve them.” The University needed about
$8,000 to pay for the carving of the capitals,
and those funds eventually came from John
Skelton Williams, an alumnus who would later
serve as assistant treasury secretary in the
administration of another alumnus, Woodrow
Wilson.
Inside the Rotunda the library completely
took over. White, who had already famously
designed the Boston Public Library, removed
the upper floor of lecture rooms and so heightened the ceilings, creating an impressive
dome room. And just as Brooks Hall had been
adorned with the names of famous natural scientists, so White carved names into a decorative plaster frieze above the dome room’s columns. (This rosette was probably from one of
the capitals of those columns.) Alongside works
from classical antiquity and the Renaissance
100
were some nineteenth-­century authors, including former student Edgar Allan Poe and Matthew Fontaine Maury, the Virginia-­born Navy
commodore and father of modern oceanography. The idea was to situate the student in the
great universe of scholarship while also inspiring ambition and hope.
The Rotunda was not the only subject of
post-­ignem renewal, however. Where the Lawn
had once descended from the Rotunda in a
series of four terraces, White added a fifth and,
for the first time, enclosed Jefferson’s architectural composition by planting on its south end
three large buildings. At the head, facing the
Rotunda, was what was then rather unimaginatively called the Academical Hall. Today it is
Old Cabell Hall, after Joseph C. Cabell, one of
the original visitors. On the east side stood the
Rouss Physical Laboratory, after its benefactor, Charles Broadway Rouss, and on the west,
the Mechanical Laboratory, later Cocke Hall, in
honor of another original visitor, General John
Hartwell Cocke.
The only thing missing from the renascent
Grounds was The School of Athens—the copy
of the Raphael painting that had adorned the
Annex’s auditorium and been lost in the fire.
With money from an anonymous donor, it was
replaced in 1902, this time with a near-­copy
made by George W. Breck, working in Rome
directly from the original. (The Vatican insisted
Breck paint four inches off the original’s scale.)
The work still hangs on the north wall of the
auditorium in Old Cabell Hall.
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41
T
he Rouss Physical Laboratory, now Rouss
Hall, was designed after the Great Fire by
Stanford White in a Jefferson-­friendly neoclassical style and positioned on the south end of
the Lawn, where it opened in 1898. It served
as the home of the McIntire School of Commerce from 1955 to 1975, and from 2007 to
the present. (A 2005 expansion of the building
compelled the University to relocate Varsity
Hall 185 feet.)
ROUSS HALL
FLOOR JOIST,
BRACKET, AND
NAILS
Rouss Hall, 1900
Made from some of America’s earliest cuttings, this heartwood pine joist is one example
of the original framing floor joists that created
the structure for Rouss Hall. The bracket from
the wood roof truss system was cast for the
original construction in 1896 by P. Duvinage
and Co., while the three nails provide examples
of the era’s penny-­type cut nails.
The building’s namesake benefactor
was Charles B. Rouss, and although some
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biographies call him Charles Broadway
Rouss—for that matter, so does the Library
of Congress—not everyone is convinced that
such a haughty appellation was his birthright.
A writer for the Jefferson County Historical
Magazine once swore that while Rouss’s middle
initial was certainly “B.,” “Broadway” was nothing more than “a happy nickname suggested
by Mr. Rouss’ mammoth building at 549–­53
Broadway, N.Y. and his nation-­wide reputation
as a Broadway merchant.”
Rouss’s life story is rags to riches in a way
that recalls that earlier patron of the University, Samuel Miller. Raised on a farm in Berkeley County, Rouss dropped out of school to
work as a store clerk, saved $500, and started
his own mercantile business. The Civil War
intervened, and after marching its duration in
the ranks of the Twelfth Virginia Infantry, Rouss
relocated to New York City, where he eventually claimed his fortune. He was, according to
one history, “a fine specimen of the true Southerner who, facing defeat and disaster with
indomitable courage, not only re-­established
himself, but also gave himself to the rehabilitation of [his] section.” This meant, among other
things, giving money to the University of Virginia and contributing half of the funds used to
build Battle Abbey in Richmond. Intended as
a shrine to the Lost Cause, it is now part of the
Virginia Historical Society.
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42
T
his wooden doll, a gift to the School
of Medicine by a grateful patient and
former employee, likely was used late in the
nineteenth century to teach medical students
where the body’s nerves are located. The maddeningly small writing that covers the doll’s
front and back was hand-­painted.
WOODEN DOLL
Dr. J. L. Cabell, who superintended two military hospitals during the Civil War, performed a
great service to the University when, in 1867, he
convinced the General Assembly not to merge
the School of Medicine with the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond. Such a merger,
the historian Philip Alexander Bruce tells us,
had long been “a nightmare that had never
ceased to disturb” members of the faculty. In
contrast to the school in Richmond, the University’s educational philosophy emphasized
a year-­long, lecture-­based course load that
preceded clinical instruction. This approach
increasingly had come to be considered out
of step with what Bruce calls “the spirit of the
age,” which demanded real patients instead of
dolls.
As younger professors were hired, however,
things began to change. In 1886, a clinic was
established on the first floor of the Anatomical
Theatre. In 1891 a single year of instruction was
extended to a necessary two in order to earn a
degree, and during that second year, students
were required to attend clinics at Piedmont
Hospital in Charlottesville.
Referring to the faculty member Dr. William B. Towles, who succeeded John Staige
Davis, a surgical colleague wrote, “Who can
forget his contempt of text-­books as a means
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of learning anatomy, and his disgust with a
student who tried, as Dr. Towles declared, ‘to
acquire his anatomical knowledge in the luxury
of his apartment under the effulgent glow of a
chandelier!’ ”
200,000 hills of tobacco with his own hands, an
excellent proof of his physical vigor and also of
his determination to earn his own living.”
Towles represented a new kind of student
and, eventually, a new kind of professor. As for
Cutting corners was not the Towles way. Hard his “physical vigor,” Bruce may have overstated
his case. Towles died in 1893, “after an illness
work was the thing. As Bruce explains, Towles
had enlisted in the Confederate army when he of a few hours,” the Alumni Bulletin reported.
He was only forty-­six years old.
was just sixteen and after the war had become
a student at the University. “The year before
matriculating,” Bruce writes, “he had planted
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43
T
his box, which probably dates to late in
the nineteenth century, represents a distinctly commercial exploitation of the Rotunda,
although not the earliest. A Charlottesville
bookbinder named Ebenezer Watts featured
the building in his advertisements all the way
back in 1827. Two years later, Watts printed
Thomas Jefferson’s memoirs, securing his connection to the former president, if not to the
University proper.
ROTUNDA
CIGAR BOX
Lithographs like the one appearing on this
box were often displayed in cigar shop windows and sold or given away with purchases
of tobacco. Such images were designed to appeal to white men—the primary purchasers of
tobacco—and were frequently supplemented
by alluring depictions of semi-­clothed, “exotic”
women. In this instance, the Rotunda appeals
to more stolid instincts: an educated man of
business and leisure, the sort to have once
studied in Jefferson’s library.
The success of the Rotunda as a marketing
tool lay, of course, in what it symbolized. It was
a marker of place, especially in Charlottesville
and Albemarle County, but by the end of the
nineteenth century, it also represented the aspirational energy vested in Jefferson, his Greek
ideas, and his Roman-­influenced architecture.
It was nostalgic in its classicism and connection
to the University’s evolving sense of itself and
its own history, but also forward-­thinking.
All of which is to say that by the end of the
nineteenth century, the Rotunda had long
stopped being simply a building or even a
library. Its image told consumers they were part
of something bigger and more important than
themselves.
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107
44
E
CONSENT
FORM FROM
WALTER REED’S
YELLOW FEVER
EXPERIMENT
xamine Maximilian Schele De Vere’s colossal compendium Students of the University of Virginia and you will find, almost two
thousand pages in, the name of Walter Reed.
A classmate of William B. Towles in the School
of Medicine, Reed received his degree in 1869.
Schele De Vere lists his birth year as 1847, but
it was actually 1851, making Reed just shy of
seventeen at the time of his graduation and
therefore one of the youngest persons ever to
have received a medical degree from the University of Virginia. Clinical opportunities were
largely absent on Grounds, so Reed continued
his education in New York before earning a
commission as an assistant surgeon in the U.S.
Army in 1875. From there clinical investigations—in particular, of contagious disease—
became his life’s work.
In the 1890s, Major Reed served on a commission that looked into the spread of typhoid,
the same disease that had killed more than a
dozen students on Grounds in 1857. With his
colleagues he helped determine its cause to
be flies carrying infectants. Reed then turned
his attention to yellow fever, an even more terrible scourge that had killed several thousand
people in Norfolk in 1855 alone. In Havana,
Cuba, the disease had claimed about a thousand people a year for more than a century,
and in 1900 the dead included U.S. troops stationed there after the Spanish-­American War.
Joining a small group of American scientists,
Reed determined to find the cause of yellow
fever, too.
His plan was to test a theory, first posited in
1881 by the Cuban doctor Carlos Juan Finlay,
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that the culprit was the mosquito—in particular, the Aedes aegypti. Until then, doctors had
believed that the disease was transmitted by
sheets and clothes infected by fever victims.
Reed gathered up a group of volunteers—
newly landed U.S. soldiers and Spanish immigrants, mostly—and informed them that because they would likely catch the fever anyway
they might as well receive immediate care from
his team. He then asked them to sign what is
believed to be the first medical consent form
ever used. In these documents, Reed promised
each person $100 for participating and another
$100 if he or she contracted the disease. In
the event of death, all money would go to the
patient’s family.
With this formality out of the way, Reed
divided participants between two cabins. In
the first of the two, participants were forced to
dress in clothes and sleep in bedding soiled
with the dried black vomit of people infected
with yellow fever. The second cabin was
stocked with Aedes aegypti known to have bitten people with the disease. No one in the first
cabin contracted yellow fever; six of the seven
patients in second cabin did. Fortunately, no
one died, but one of the infected patients, the
Army nurse Clara Maass, volunteered a year
later to become infected a second time to determine whether she had become resistant to
the disease. She hadn’t and died six days later.
Officials in Havana set about killing mosquitoes and soon all but eradicated the disease.
As for Walter Reed, he gave due credit to Dr.
Finlay even while receiving honorary degrees
from Harvard and Michigan. He died on November 23, 1902, from a ruptured appendix.
The Walter Reed General Hospital, in Washington, D.C. (later Walter Reed Army Medical
Center), was named in his honor in 1909.
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45
J
CAST OF JOHN
POWELL’S HAND
ohn Powell graduated from the University
of Virginia in 1901 and went on to become
an acclaimed pianist and composer—famous
enough to have a cast made of his hand and
to be declared, upon his death in 1963, “one
of the genuinely great Virginians of modern
times.” The governor proclaimed John Powell
Day in 1951, and in 1968 Radford College (later
Radford University) named its music building after the artist. In 2010, however, Radford
rescinded the honor after one of its administrators learned more about Powell. “The bulb
went on in my head immediately,” he told the
Roanoke Times, “and I realized, ‘Oh, my god.
I’ve got to do something about this.’ ”
What troubled the Radford administrator
was Powell’s racial politics, well evidenced
in an op-­ed he published in the Richmond
Times-­Dispatch on July 22, 1923, headlined,
“Is White America to Become a Negroid Nation?” The answer, Powell contended, was yes,
and to prove his point he recounted the day he
spent forty-­five minutes in his native Richmond
standing on the corner of Second and Broad
Streets—a de facto boundary line between the
city’s white and black business districts—counting all the faces. There were white faces and
black faces but also, to Powell’s alarm, faces of
any number of shades in between. These he
identified as the result of race-­mixing, and as a
harbinger of the end of American civilization.
As part of his project to “save” America,
Powell did a number of things. He composed
music that drew from what he supposed to
be white-­only sources—“Negro music was
meagre and monotonous,” he wrote—and
110
promoted Appalachian traditions by helping to establish the White Top Folk Festival,
in Southwest Virginia. In 1922, with his friend
Ernest S. Cox, he founded the Anglo-­Saxon
Clubs of America, which was dedicated to finding the “fundamental and final solutions of our
racial problems in general, most especially of
the Negro problem.” Finally, he lobbied the
General Assembly to pass what became the
Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which prohibited
the marriage of whites to nonwhites.
Over forty years later, in the landmark Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court would
declare that law unconstitutional, and with it all
race-­based restrictions on marriage.
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46
I
n 1903, James Hay Jr., a fourth-­year student
and the namesake son of a Virginia congressman, penned a few lines for Corks and
Curls, of which he served as editor. “The Honor
Men,” as it would come to be known, stands as
a kind of doggerel challenge to live up to the
ideals of the University of Virginia:
KNIFE OF “THE
HONOR MEN”
POET
If you live a long, long time, and hold always honesty
of conscience above honesty of purse;
And turn aside without ostentation to aid the weak;
And treasure ideals more than raw ambition;
And track no man to his undeserved hurt;
And pursue no woman to her tears . . .
Then—
Remembering the purple shadows on the Lawn, . . .
you may say in reverence and thankfulness:
“I have worn the honors of Honor. I graduated from
Virginia.”
Today the poem is distributed at convocation to all first-­year students as a reminder of
the University’s Honor system, which obliges
students not to cheat or lie and encourages
them to report anyone who does. A single
infraction can lead to expulsion or the revocation of one’s degree. As a result, the stakes of
Honor are high, a fact that makes the system
galvanizing for many students.
This concept of honor has a history in the
South that has made some people uncomfortable. Professor Paul M. Gaston, whose memoir Coming of Age in Utopia was published
in 2010, writes that in the mid-­1950s, when he
began teaching, the Honor system emphasized students’ status as “gentlemen.” He
worried that while it “promoted a community
112
of trust,” it also “promoted a way of life in
which its members could continue to think
of themselves as special, above and beyond the ordinary run of human beings. They
were gentlemen, their reputations with other
gentlemen secure and unsullied.” In his classes
on the Old South, Gaston lectured on how
honor had traditionally been founded on class,
hierarchy, and reputation. “The way I structured
it,” he writes, “led more than one student to
come up to me afterward with a concerned
look on his face. ‘This sounds very much like
our own honor system,’ one troubled young
man remarked. My disingenuous reply—‘Oh,
really?’—did not ease his concern.”
honor” was often used to defend white supremacy. By the twenty-­first century, however,
much of that baggage had been shed by the
University’s Honor system, which has even instituted the Community Relations and Diversity
Advisory Committee to address concerns that
minority populations are disproportionately
charged with Honor offences.
As for James Hay, he went on to work for the
Washington Post and the Washington Times,
and was a founder of the National Press Club.
It is believed he had this knife made in England
during his post-­graduation sojourn across Europe.
Gaston, an active participant in the civil
rights movement, understood that “southern
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T
GARRETT HALL
CEILING
his ornate ceiling—made of plaster of
Paris on a burlap backing and suspended
from the rafters by burlap straps—hangs above
the Great Hall in Garrett Hall. Approved by the
Board of Visitors in 1906 as a dining hall, the
building is located on a quadrangle bounded
on the east by Cocke Hall, on the south by the
McIntire Amphitheater, and on the west by
Minor Hall. Other buildings erected around
the same time include Madison Hall and what
the historian Philip Alexander Bruce calls “the
handsomest” of them all, the president’s house
on Carr’s Hill. This Jeffersonian mansion proved
to be “more graceful than dignified, more
beautiful than noble, yet the structure breathes
both nobility and dignity.” That, at least, was
the opinion of Dr. William Lambeth, a professor
in the medical school and part-­time architectural critic who authored a book on Jefferson’s
architecture.
The Commons, as the dining hall was then
called, enjoyed no such accolades, although
its purpose, Bruce tells us, was important. It
was intended to reduce the cost of board while
bringing “students together three times daily,
and thus creat[ing] a college centre to promote intimacy.” Designed by McKim, Mead &
White, the Commons opened in the summer
of 1908 and was immediately unsuccessful.
According to Bruce, 222 students ate there
during its first year, but only 140 the next. The
numbers inched up over the third year, but
still amounted to only about a quarter of the
student body. Hotelkeepers were not amenable to the competition, the service proved
unimpressive (Bruce makes passing reference
114
to a Frenchman being in charge), and many
students judged the entire enterprise to be
“superfluous.”
Various inducements, including discounted
dormitory fees, eventually pried students away
from their regular tables and into the Commons. In 1958, the dining hall was moved
to Newcomb Hall and the next year, after a
renovation, the Commons became home to
the revived office of the bursar. It was renamed
Garrett Hall in honor of the University’s first
bursar, Alexander Garrett. In 2011, after two
years and more than $12 million worth of renovation work that included the preservation of
this original ceiling, the University dedicated
Garrett Hall as the home of the Frank Batten
School of Leadership and Public Policy.
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T
LOVING CUP
his sterling silver cup from Tiffany and
Company was presented by the faculty in
1910 to the University’s first president, Edwin
Anderson Alderman, “in grateful recognition of
his devoted and efficient service to the University of Virginia . . . and also of his just and sympathetic attitude towards his colleagues.” It
was a loving cup, which is to say a two-­handled
chalice shared among friends, family, and colleagues on ceremonial occasions. From about
1915 through the 1960s, the graduating class
sipped mint julep from this particular specimen, passing it around in front of the Jefferson
statue on the north side of the Rotunda on
Class Day, just before what became known as
Valediction Exercises.
In 1910 President Alderman was ending his
sixth year on Grounds, having been hired in
June 1904 and formally inaugurated the following April. Alderman came to Charlottesville
with impressive credentials, having also served
as president of the University of North Carolina (1896–­1900) and Tulane University (1900–­
1904). At the forefront of an educational reform
movement, he sought to modernize higher
education through fundraising, building renovations, and less formal teaching methods.
At the University of Virginia, he established
the Curry Memorial School of Education
in 1905, in part with $100,000 from John D.
Rockefeller. Another $500,000 from Andrew
Carnegie in 1909 endowed chairs of what were
henceforth to be called the Edgar Allan Poe
School of English, the James Wilson School
of Political Economy and Political Science,
the James Madison School of Law, the James
116
Monroe School of International Law, the Walter
Reed School of Pathology, and the Carnegie
School of Engineering. (The names did not
stick.) Alderman also proposed a new library,
the construction of which was not completed
until after his death.
As much as anyone, perhaps, Alderman
transformed the University, turning it from
an institution that existed in large part as a
breeding ground for gentlemen into one that
attempted to serve its state and nation more
directly. Now the University sought to produce,
for instance, teachers and engineers, men who
could move quickly and productively into the
Edwin Anderson Alderman
state’s professional class. Alderman even supported higher education for women. Although
a bill in the General Assembly to create a
coordinate college for women was defeated
in 1916, four years later the University began
admitting (white) women to its graduate and
professional studies programs.
By 1929 the student body had increased
four-­fold and the endowment had grown from
$350,000 to $10 million. Two years later, in the
twenty-­seventh year of his presidency, Alderman suffered a stroke while on his way to a
speaking engagement at the University of Illinois. He died on April 30, 1931.
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49
TRACK MEDAL
T
his track medal, awarded by the student-­
run General Athletic Association at a
meet against Johns Hopkins in 1910, features
a phoenix in its center. A staple of Greek mythology, the bird died in a burst of flame and
rose to new life from its own ashes—not unlike
Thomas Jefferson’s university
Athletics had played a role in this rebirth, although the historian Philip Alexander Bruce in
his History of the University of Virginia goes to
great lengths to remind us of the lurking evils
of professionalism and bad sportsmanship. Appointed to address these pitfalls, a faculty committee dutifully issued a report—approved in
January 1906—that Bruce declares “one of the
most honorable landmarks in the history of the
University of Virginia.” Gentlemen engaged in
sport, he writes, should remember “that they
were gentlemen first, and only incidentally,
players.” Further, “they were to follow, not the
bastard honor which calls for victory at whatever price of fraud or brutality, but the voice of
true honor, which prefers an hundred defeats
to victory purchased by chicanery or unfair
dealing.”
118
In 1916, President Edwin Anderson Alderman
had refused to allow a young man, recently
flunked out of Columbia, to play football for
Virginia against Virginia Tech. Bruce portrays
this as a great victory for the ideals of sportsmanship, but neglects to mention the game’s
subsequent fistfights and ejections. The tensions inherent in the modern NCAA term
“scholar-­athlete” were apparent even in the
early twentieth century.
Members of the track team, however, seem
to have handled this dual role nicely. They defeated Johns Hopkins three times in 1910 and
did well academically, too, outperforming not
only the football team but the student body as
a whole. In this respect, the runners got it right:
students first, athletes second.
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50
T
HOT FOOT
CROWN
his crown, made from a wide tin ring and
decorated with seven feet, was probably
fitted in 1911 for Charles Edward Moran, King
C-­Ski II of the Hot Foot Society. According to
the historian Philip Alexander Bruce, “The Hot
Feet was an association formed apparently
for the single purpose of enjoying the grand
ceremony of crowning one of their number
king in the presence of the public as spectators.” However, in his Jefferson, Cabell and the
University of Virginia, published in 1906, the
University librarian John S. Patton insists that
the group began in 1902 as a baseball team
organized on the East Range. Whatever the
case, the coronation ceremony, held during
Mardi Gras and with similar trappings, became
a highlight of the University calendar, with the
king being chosen, according to Moran, for his
“ability to empty without removing from his
lips a four-­quart underbed piece of crockery,
called the ‘Sacred Stein,’ filled with beer. Quite
a stunt, but entirely possible after a week or so
of intensive practice.”
Moran later recalled that not long into his
reign he and “four of his chosen courtiers entered the basement of Cabell Hall and proceeded to remove therefrom all of the animals,
snakes and other critters (with the exception
of the Mastodon) and place them behind the
desks of the professors in their classrooms
and before the front door of each professor’s
residence on the Lawn.” It was a great prank
and, refreshingly, did not endanger the lives
of faculty members or their horses. Still, it led
administrators to declare the society’s existence to be, “on the whole, very detrimental
120
to the University’s welfare.” The Hot Feet were
henceforth banned.
Other societies already existed on Grounds,
such as the Mystic Order of Eli Banana (established 1878); the 13 Society (1889), which
celebrated Jefferson’s birthday, April 13;
T.I.L.K.A. (1889); the semisecret Z Society
(1892), the members of which Moran described as “a bunch of insufferable snobs”;
the Poe-­obsessed Raven Society (1904); and
the super-­secret Seven Society (ca. 1905). One
more group was added in January 1913, when
Moran, then in the hospital recuperating from
an appendectomy, gathered to his bedside
the former Hot Feet and dubbed them now
members of the IMP Society, “bearing always
in mind that Incarnate Memories Prevail.”
Moyston: “After considerable weird chanting and incantations by the Three Witches in
their black robes and pointed hoods hovering
over the blue and yellow flames of the burning
canned alcohol in a large iron cauldron, to the
accompaniment of deafening thunder in an
otherwise completely darkened ball room, the
name of M-­Ski the First was extracted therefrom amid the shouts of the loyal subjects in
their horned hoods and carrying brilliantly dazzling sparklers.”
At this moment C-­Ski II removed the crown
pictured here and, to loud applause, placed it
on the head of M-­Ski. “It was indeed an event
long to be remembered,” Moran wrote, “and
placed the newly formed organization very favorably in the public eye.”
In his memoir, Moran vividly describes the
coronation of the society’s first king, Roy C.
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T
CARTOON
FROM THE FIRST
CLASS REUNION
he first reunion weekend took place June
14–­18, 1913, and was organized by the
Class of 1908 and its hugely enthusiastic class
secretary, Lewis Dabney Crenshaw. So enthusiastic was Crenshaw, in fact, that he edited and
published a 140‑page history of the quinquennial, or five-­year reunion, one that begins and
ends with the heroic verse of James Hay Jr. The
history is illustrated throughout with humorous pen-­and-­ink drawings like the ones shown
here, which apparently found use as letterhead.
Their creator, Carl Zeisberg, Class of ‘13, went
on to edit the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin
and cofound the United States Table Tennis
Association, the website for which describes
him as “an authoritarian and consequently
controversial figure” who hid behind a “Kaiser
Wilhelm” mustache.
Zeisberg depicts the returning Virginia men
as sailors, albeit with a particular taste for gin
and barbecue. That’s because each class arriving in Charlottesville that weekend was assigned its own costume, to be worn on parade
through Grounds. Members of the Class of
1903 were dressed, for example, as Mexicans;
‘07 as Zouaves (elaborately dressed French
infantrymen whose uniforms were adopted by
some units during the Civil War); ‘09 as Alpine
climbers; and ‘13 as farmers. The seventy-­
nine men of ‘08, Crenshaw writes, “wore their
stunning sailor costumes and drew a battleship float christened ‘Dread-­Naught-­Eight,’
equipped with guns, portholes, and a Marconi Station with an operator on the job.” The
whole lot marched to Lambeth Field, where
Roman centurions played baseball and several
122
Lewis Dabney Crenshaw
Lewis Dabney Crenshaw’s history of the University’s first class reunion
123
secret societies engaged in mock burials,
resuscitations, and transubstantiations. This
was followed by “a burlesque presentation of
a futurist statue of the Founder of the University, a chicken-­chase, a pro-­suffrage riot, which
resulted in the destruction of the above work
of art, [and] a score of individual antics by the
clowns and farmers.”
The event was a success and ushered in
a tradition that continues to this day. Crenshaw, meanwhile, remained heavily involved in
alumni activities. In 1914 he became the alumni
recorder, a new office that combined secretary
and treasurer of the General Alumni Association. When the United States entered World
War I he moved to Paris, where he served as
director of the University of Virginia European
Bureau, a fancy name for what was basically a
small wartime office of alumni outreach. In April
1919 he helped to organize a reunion of nearly
three hundred overseas alumni to celebrate
both Jefferson’s birthday and the University’s centennial. Servicemen still wearing on
their uniforms the soot of the Great War were
granted leave and treated to both a daylong
excursion down the Seine and a field trip to the
location of Thomas Jefferson’s former residence. More than 2,500 students and alumni
served in the war, and 80 of them died.
124
Lewis Dabney Crenshaw wrote this inscription to P hilip Alexander Bruce, author of a
five-­v olume history of the University, in a copy of his book about the first class reunion
B
y November 13, 1915, the college football
season was reaching its climax. Virginia
boasted a 7–­1 record, having fallen only to
powerhouse Harvard, 9–­0. Along the way the
Orange and Blue had embarrassed Richmond 74–­0, throttled VMI 44–­0, dismantled
Randolph-­Macon 20–­0, and politely dispatched
Yale 10–­0, becoming the first southern team
ever to do so. It was fitting, then, that the
team’s star halfback, Eugene Noble “Buck”
Mayer, should be featured on the front page
of Sporting Life, a popular weekly newspaper.
Mayer was one of the most successful athletes
in the school’s history, but alas—like that earlier
halfback Archer Christian—fated to an early
death.
The photograph of Mayer notwithstanding,
Sporting Life did not write specifically about
Virginia in that issue. However, a taste of the
praise the fourth-­year evoked even among
opponents is offered by the Nashville Tennessean of November 7. Reporting disconsolately
on hometown Vanderbilt’s defeat at the hands
of Virginia, 35–­10, the paper’s coverage of the
event was headlined “Buck Mayer Sounds
Commodores’ Doom.” At one point in the
game “Mayer headed full sail around Vandy’s
left end. He had no interference to speak of,
but he ran with his feet high and kept on going. Six tacklers made futile dives at the speedy
back, but he passed them all and planted the
ball safely behind the goal posts.” Not only
was this Vanderbilt’s first loss of the season, it
was the first time the Commodores had been
scored against.
125
BUCK MAYER ON
THE COVER OF
SPORTING LIFE
52
Buck Mayer was a native of Norfolk who, enrolled in the law school since 1910, had played
for the football team since 1912. In subsequent
seasons he set records for the number of
points scored in a single game (36), the most
touchdowns in a season (21 in 1914), the most
touchdowns in a career (48), and the most
points scored in a career (312). In 1915 he was
the first player from the South to be chosen an
All-­American, and in 1980 was elected to the
Virginia Sports Hall of Fame. Mayer’s record
was especially remarkable considering that
he had never played football before joining
the team and broke his knee during the 1914
campaign.
Buck Mayer
Upon graduation, Mayer established a law
practice in Yorke Center, West Virginia. In 1918,
he enlisted in a machine gun company bound
for the war in Europe, but before he could ship
out he caught influenza and died. Just twenty-­
six years old, Mayer left behind, in addition to
a legendary career on the gridiron, a wife and
daughter.
126
127
53
J
ames R. McConnell, a former University of
Virginia law student, was thirty years old in
March 1917, when he was shot out of the sky by
a pair of German aircraft. His death is memorialized on Grounds by The Aviator, a sculpture
that shows an Icarus-­like figure—as the inscription says—“soaring like an eagle into new
heavens of valor and devotion.” The bronze
monument, dedicated in 1919, was designed
and cast by Gutzon Borglum, the famous
Danish-­American sculptor of Mount Rushmore
and the Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, Georgia. The Aviator is a grand and heroic
tribute, but this jagged strip from McConnell’s
crashed plane offers a truer and more violent
image of his death.
STRIP FROM
JAMES R.
McConnell was born in Chicago in 1887,
MCCONNELL’S
the son of a judge, and grew up in New York
and North Carolina. In 1908 he arrived on
CRASHED PLANE City
Grounds, spending two years in the academic
department and one in the law school. While
at Virginia he founded a flying club, reigned as
king of the Hot Feet, and accepted membership in the Seven Society, Beta Theta Pi, and
Theta Nu Epsilon. He was even a cheerleader.
In 1910 McConnell went to work for a railroad company in North Carolina, and five years
later, after the outbreak of war in Europe, he
volunteered to drive ambulances in France.
Unlike Ernest Hemingway or E. E. Cummings,
he found service in France to be a “glorious
experience,” and was awarded a Croix de
Guerre for his rescue of a wounded French
soldier. Soon he began aviation training, and in
1916 he became one of thirty-­eight pilots, most
of them American, who formed what came to
128
be known as L’escadrille Lafayette. The French
squadron took its name from the Marquis de
Lafayette, symbol of Franco-­American friendship who, in 1824, had dined in the Rotunda.
Lafayette had once defended American freedom, and now a Virginia man returned the
favor—with a red “hot foot” painted on his
plane.
In April 1916 McConnell quartered at Luxeuil
Les Bains, a luxurious former royal spa, so it
makes sense that his friend, Victor Chapman,
wrote home that “McConnell says he finds the
war quite a fashionable pastime.” A Harvard
graduate, Chapman had fought for France in
129
the trenches but found himself better suited to
fighting in the air. He was shot down and killed
on June 23. Another comrade in Luxeuil, Kiffin
Rockwell, met his end on September 23. (A
North Carolinian, Rockwell had attended the
Virginia Military Institute and Washington and
Lee University.)
Early in 1917 McConnell published a memoir,
Flying for France, and in it he describes, with
unusual frankness, what it was like to see his
friends die. “I know of no sound more horrible than that made by an airplane crashing to
earth,” he wrote. “Breathless one has watched
the uncontrolled apparatus tumble through the
air. The agony felt by the pilot and passenger
seems to transmit itself to you. You are helpless
to avert the certain death. You cannot even
turn your eyes away at the moment of impact.
In the dull, grinding crash there is the sound of
breaking bones.”
McConnell himself fell from the sky while
battling over the Somme on March 19. He was
the last American pilot to die under French colors before the United States entered the war.
James McConnell
130
The Aviator, Gutzon Borglum’s memorial for James McConnell, currently stands outside
Clemons Library on Grounds
131
54
H
ere sit all five volumes of Philip Alexander Bruce’s History of the University of
Virginia, 1819–­1919: The Lengthened Shadow
of One Man, published from 1920 to 1922. No
history of the University has been as exhaustive, as celebratory, or, in places, as troubling
as Bruce’s.
HISTORY OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF
VIRGINIA
Bruce was born in 1856 in Charlotte County,
the scion of a well-­connected and powerful
family. After attending the University for two
years in the 1870s, he read law at Harvard and
then returned to Grounds to study under John
B. Minor. Bruce became bored with courtrooms
and briefs, however, and focused instead on
history. His first book, The Plantation Negro
as a Freeman, published in 1889, argued for
the general moral and intellectual inferiority
of African Americans, while subsequent works
were marked by a nostalgia for the Old South
and a belief in the phoenix-­like rise of the
New South. He penned a three-­part history
of Virginia, a biography of Robert E. Lee, and
something called Brave Deeds of Confederate Soldiers, before packing up and moving to
Charlottesville. In 1916 the University named
him its centennial historian.
Bruce’s five volumes, as their subtitle suggests, focus on the towering influence of
Thomas Jefferson, his greatness, and “the
absolute correctness of his foresight.” “During the last one hundred years,” Bruce writes
at book’s end, “the majestic shade of that
founder has seemed to brood above his beautiful academic village ever solicitous to warn,
to guide, and to inspire.” This is a powerful
image, one invoking Jefferson pacing along
132
the north terrace of Monticello, telescope in
hand, watching his pavilions and Rotunda rise.
The next hundred years, however, would
be marked by fierce challenges to Jefferson’s
vision, to his “absolute correctness,” and to
ideas of gentlemen’s honor and Anglo-­Saxon
justice, even as nearly all associated with the
University continue to acknowledge the founder’s primacy and special genius.
133
55
T
his bid card, delivered to Richard D. Gilliam Jr. in 1923, is for membership in the
Raven Society. Established in April 1904 and
named for Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous
poem, the group showed little interest in secret
rites. Instead, its founder, William McCully
James, proposed an honor society based on
scholarly merit, and a grateful faculty approved
the proposal in less than ten days.
RAVEN SOCIETY
BID CARD
In 1907, President Edwin Anderson Alderman entrusted to the Raven Society upkeep
of Poe’s old room at 13 West Range. According to Thomas G. Tucker, in a remembrance
penned in 1880, Poe had originally roomed on
the Lawn with a fellow called Miles George.
“They had been together but a short time
when something arose to disturb the harmonious intercourse—perhaps Miles refused to
arise on cold mornings to answer the knock
of Mr. Wertenbaker, who in those good old
days made the rounds each morning to see if
The Raven Society’s banner carried in Final Exercises, 2009
134
the fellows were up and dressed and ready for
work,” Tucker recalled. (William Wertenbaker
was the University’s second librarian.) “Or
perhaps Edgar Allan was unwilling to count
clothes on Monday morning when the washer-­
woman came.”
Whatever the case, “they had a falling out
and they had something more—a genuine,
good, old-­fashioned fight. Without saying a
word to anyone, they quietly retired into a field
near the University. After one or two rounds,
in which they both showed a sufficient amount
of courage and a strong desire to black each
other’s eyes, they mutually agreed that they
were satisfied.”
After that, Poe moved to 13 West Range.
In 1924 and then again in the 1950s the University worked to restore the room to its 1826
appearance. A short feature in the New York
Times in 1912 referred to “the crayon drawings
with which Poe is said to have decorated his
walls,” although no such drawings have been
part of any renovation. The poet’s childhood
bed is there, however, donated by the Allan
family of Richmond. Also on display is a bronze
tablet, donated by Lois A. Bangs and Mary B.
Whiton, principals of the National Cathedral
School for Girls in Washington, D.C. It reads,
“Domus parva magni poetae”—a small room
for a big poet.
There is also a raven, of course, and nowadays the Raven Society assigns one of its members to sweep and dust in the room. In 2009,
a hundred years after Poe’s birth, that student
was Lawson Anderson. “Poe was a mystical, introverted, lonely genius,” he told the University
of Virginia Magazine. “It’s my personal opinion
that the Raven Society would have catered to a
student like Poe. Maybe it would have helped
someone as brilliant and troubled as him.”
135
56
T
MODEL OF
GROUNDS
his model of Grounds was completed
in October 1926 for the Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia, a world’s fair
celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Although formally
invited, the University of Virginia did not actually exhibit at the big event. President Edwin
Anderson Alderman had appealed to the state
for funding, but the request but had been denied. Governor Harry F. Byrd, an apple farmer
from Winchester, had built his reputation on
fiscal responsibility, and Virginia’s unrivaled
connection to the Declaration’s author notwithstanding, he thought the money would be
better spent elsewhere. By the time Alderman’s appeal had been rejected, however, the
people of Charlottesville had already commissioned the model.
Alderman pulled a few strings and found
space in Jefferson’s House, a reproduction of
the room Thomas Jefferson had rented while
staying in Philadelphia back in 1776. Operated
by the Southern Woman’s Committee and the
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, it was
part of the larger High Street exhibition of historical recreations that included George Washington’s presidential quarters and Benjamin
Franklin’s print shop. According to the architectural historian Lydia Mattice Brandt, a quaint atmosphere took precedence over historical accuracy on High Street, resulting in what Brandt
has called “a Colonial fantasyland.” Where a
present-­day historian sees papier-­mâché, however, the Saturday Evening Post of 1926 saw
the firmer materials of ordinary lives and good
character. “So these homes of another era are
136
in reality symbols of the solid, unspectacular
integrity of our forefathers,” the magazine
reported, “which we believe still exists in our
people today.”
The University of Virginia’s model of Grounds
was not in keeping with this only loosely historical approach. The company hired to build
it was Mindeleff Studios, the owner of which,
Victor Mindeleff, had once worked with his
brother Cosmos at the Bureau of Ethnology
and the Smithsonian Institution on a survey of
Native American pueblos in Arizona and New
Mexico. He, in turn, passed the job on to William T. Partridge, an architect who had apprenticed under Charles McKim of McKim, Mead &
White. In 1901, while working with McKim on a
planning report for Washington, D.C., Partridge had supervised the construction of two
intricate models of the National Mall.
The model was the product of scrupulous
research. Working away from Grounds, Partridge relied on detailed photographs of the
Academical Village, and his work was delayed
when bad weather prevented quality pictures
from being taken.
In the end, the model was late and over
budget. Promised for August 1, it was not
delivered until October 12, by which time the
Sesquicentennial Exposition was almost over.
(To be fair, Alderman had insisted at the last
minute that Partridge include several additional buildings, including the president’s
house on Carr’s Hill.) The model’s cost, meanwhile, originally projected at $650, came in
at $1,152.30, which included a wooden frame
and glass case. Restored in 2010, it now sits on
display in Campbell Hall, home to the School
of Architecture.
137
I
57
PAVILION VI
FRESCOES
n November 1824 Thomas Jefferson and
the Marquis de Lafayette enjoyed dinner
together in the Rotunda. One hundred and five
years later, President Edwin Anderson Alderman and the French ambassador, Paul Claudel, dedicated the newly christened Lafayette
Room on the second floor of Pavilion VI, which
had once housed instruction in the Romance
languages. Alderman recalled the two old
friends “wandering arm in arm over the green
lawn and through the pillars of this seminary of
learning, newly planted here.” Supporting this
image was the room’s chief attraction: frescoes
of Jefferson and Lafayette—at Monticello and
at Yorktown—painted by Jean-­Robert and
Martha La Montagne Saint Hubert.
The commission for the frescoes was paid
for with a $10,000 gift from Ormond G. Smith,
president of the French Institute of America.
Also the president of Street and Smith Publishing Company, of New York, Smith was credited
by the New York Times with discovering the
writer O. Henry, “whose first works appeared
in some of Mr. Smith’s magazines.” The Times
also covered the opening of the Lafayette
Room, and quoted Monsieur Saint Hubert as
thanking Professor Stringfellow Barr for his
enlightening treatise on the symbolism of the
Jefferson-­Lafayette frescoes. “There remains
one thing in his description which he has overlooked, though very excusably,” Saint Hubert
said. “I want to repair this oversight.”
Saint Huber indicated a tablet that bore
Smith’s name. “This room will be another symbol of the strong international link of friendship between the sister republics,” the artist
138
announced. “It affords me a new opportunity
to give expression of gratitude for all that
France has meant to me. I grew up there as
a young man and it was there that the magic
door of art and music and books was opened
to me.”
According to the Times, Saint Hubert then
opened a false door and revealed a secret portrait, done in fresco, of the picture-­shy Smith. In
2009 Bob Sweeney, at the time University development director and the pavilion’s resident,
pointed out the hidden painting to a local
newspaper reporter. “That’s the donor,” he
said, referring to the balding but well-­tailored
Smith. “Another resident told me they had
young kids and kept that door closed because
it freaked them out, this guy standing there.”
139
58
MERTON SPIRE
P
avilion VI may house Franco-­American
frescoes and a secret portrait hidden by a
false door, but behind the building is something even more unexpected: a sixteen-­foot-­
tall, three-­ton, sandstone spire that once sat
atop the chapel at Merton College, Oxford.
How it made its way to the University of Virginia is not known.
“That’s the $64,000 question,” Mary Hughes,
the University’s chief landscape architect, told
the Richmond Times-­Dispatch in 2007.
The minutes of the Board of Visitors dated
April 22, 1927, list various gifts to the University: a bronze bust of Jefferson, some books for
the law library, half of that original orange and
blue scarf that belonged to the footballer Allen
Potts (the other half is held by the Virginia Historical Society), and, with no other explanation,
“one of the pinnacles from the tower of the
Merton Chapel.”
The spire may have come down during
World War I, and in the 1920s, Oxford decided
to give away its cast-­offs. Hughes speculates
that the University wished to honor Thomas
Jefferson. Others have wondered whether
several prominent faculty members with ties
140
to Oxford, including Robert Gooch, Scott
Buchanan, and Stringfellow Barr, may have
facilitated such a gift. Whatever the case, Merton College was founded in 1264 and its main
chapel finished in 1425. A tower was added
in 1451, which makes this spire more than 560
years old.
In 2005, a mini-­tornado brought down
two maple trees in the garden, one of which
toppled the spire. As part of its reconstruction efforts, the University purchased an
800‑pound block of Clipsham limestone and
cut a replacement for a piece of the spire that
had been shattered. (Clipsham limestone,
from Rutland County, England, is also used at
Oxford, although the original spire was carved
out of stone from the long-­closed Headington
Quarry.)
The work prompted a flurry of articles about
the spire and speculations as to its origins,
none of which arrived at anything definitive.
Perhaps the mystery is part of its charm, as it
sits there, an object of reflection, in the only
garden with much shade.
“It’s the oldest thing on Grounds outside the
museum collections,” Hughes said.
141
59
I
THE ELEUSIS OF
CHI OMEGA
n 1894, the University of Virginia faculty declared that scholarship might make women
“boisterous, familiar and bold in manners, and
perhaps even rudely aggressive” in addition
to “unsexing” them. However, in 1919, the
General Assembly passed a bill forcing the
University to admit women to its graduate and
professional schools beginning in 1920–­21. (Under certain conditions, undergraduate women
were also admitted, but only to the School of
Education.) The assembly took this action, the
historian Virginius Dabney wrote, “over the
strong objections of professors, students, and
alumni,” many of whom helped make the transition to partial coeducation as uncomfortable
as possible. In fact, according to Dabney, the
entrance of women “into classes was signalized at times by loud stamping of feet,” and
in at least one case a woman being summarily
ordered out of the room.
By 1924, sixty-­one women had enrolled,
including two in law, seven in medicine, and
thirty-­six in education. Three years later, the
dean of women, Adelaide Douglas Simpson,
helped to organize the first nationally affiliated sorority on Grounds: the Lambda Gamma
chapter of Chi Omega. Founded in 1895 at the
University of Arkansas, the sorority is now one
of the largest in the world. On Grounds in 1927,
however, it was too small for a house, so members met regularly for lunch on the East Range.
Their creed, the “Chi Omega Symphony,”
was written in 1909 by Ethel Switzer Howard,
a member of the Xi chapter at Northwestern
University. Their national magazine was the
Eleusis of Chi Omega. The September 1929
142
issue, shown here, compares exam-­time reading to orgies and mentions a “Home Economics dance chorus.”
As for fraternities, they had thrived on
Grounds since the founding of Delta Kappa
Epsilon in the 1850s. According to the historian
Philip Alexander Bruce, the faculty had originally denied permission for the organization,
worrying that its secretiveness “might have
a tendency to nourish further that insubordinate disposition which had so often flamed up
among students.” It had been more than a decade since John A. G. Davis had been shot in
front of Pavilion X, but the professors were still
wary. Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before DKE
was meeting and Greek-­letter societies began to proliferate. By the 1920s they blended
seamlessly with the debating societies, honor
societies, and secret societies
President Colgate W. Darden would later
question, and even challenge, the power of
Greek organizations on Grounds, but without
much success. As of 2015, about 35 percent of
the student body claimed membership in one
of sixty-­three fraternity and sorority chapters,
while the Chi Omegas numbered 150 young
women.
143
60
T
MOUNTAIN LAKE
HERBARIUM
COLLECTION
his handwritten botanical record is one
of nearly seven thousand that for decades have been stored at the Mountain Lake
Biological Station in Giles County. Established
in 1930 atop Salt Pond Mountain, the University outpost originally made its home inside
the Mountain Lake Hotel. There, graduate
students from across the South took courses
in botany and zoology. In 1934, a laboratory,
a dining hall, and residential cottages were
built near the hotel at Mountain Lake, and two
years after that a library. The station’s second
director, Ivey Foreman Lewis, named the cottages for important botanists, and today one
of those cottages, along with the main laboratory, is named for him.
A native of Raleigh, North Carolina, Lewis
was appointed the Miller Professor of Biology
at the University in 1914, in the department
first endowed by the self-­made millionaire
Samuel Miller at his death in 1869. The connection between Miller and Lewis is somewhat
ironic, because Miller’s life work was predicated on the notion that a person’s origins did
not dictate his or her destiny. Lewis, however,
felt that biology demonstrated otherwise. In a
1924 speech on Grounds, sponsored by John
Powell’s Anglo-­Saxon Clubs and reported on in
the New York Times, Lewis told students, “The
one clear message that biological investigation
has brought as its gift to the thought of the
twentieth century is that the idea of environment molding something out of nothing is
sheer nonsense.” In fact, he said, “the idea of
144
the great American melting pot, into which one
can put the refuse of three continents and draw
out good, sound American citizens [is] simply
and perilously false.”
Unsurprisingly, Lewis was a supporter of segregation. “There is no biological principle better established than that of inequality of races,”
he wrote, “and yet sociologists, especially the
Jewish ones, are loud and effective in their denial of any racial differences, even saying there
is no such thing as race.”
Lewis became dean of the University in 1934
and served as dean of the College of Arts and
Sciences from 1946 until his retirement in 1953.
One of the houses of the International Residential College is named in his honor.
In the post-­Lewis era, the study of biology
has continued at Mountain Lake, even while
the conclusions derived from that study have
changed drastically. Mountain Lake now
educates both graduate and undergraduate
students and houses 45–­100 people at any
given time. The herbarium collection, meanwhile, has been crucial to botanical investigations on the site. Plant and tree samples like
this one—pasted or taped onto paper and
then labeled—have long been stored in a
green metal file cabinet, but researchers have
recently digitized and transcribed them for online access. Such a resource, Mountain Lake’s
director said in 2013, will be helpful in showing
scientists how plants and their distributions
have changed over time.
145
61
I
n August 1935, Alice Jackson applied to the
graduate school at the University of Virginia
to complete a master’s degree in French that
she had begun at Smith College. The twenty-­
two-­year-­old Jackson was a Richmond native
and a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth
University. She was also a rather untraditional
applicant: not only a woman, but an African
American.
LETTER FROM
ALICE JACKSON
TO BOARD OF
VISITORS
In its September 19 meeting, the Board of
Visitors rejected Jackson’s application, citing its policy against admitting black students
along with “other good and sufficient reasons
not necessary to be herein enumerated.” Nine
days later, Jackson—then working with the
NAACP to create a test case out of the University’s intransigence—responded with this open
letter. In it, she addressed the visitors directly:
“I herewith respectfully call you to specify
the ‘other good and sufficient reasons’ why
you rejected my application. The ‘other good
and sufficient reasons’ may be such that I can
remove them by additional information. At all
events, I wish to know in full, the reasons why
my application was rejected.”
The visitors declined to elaborate, nor did
they respond at all. A small anti-­Fascist, pro-­
Communist group on Grounds calling itself
the National Students League issued a protest
that was published by the New York Times.
The Richmond Times-­Dispatch, meanwhile,
adopted much the same stance that the University had back when Caroline Preston Davis
forced it to consider the possibility of admitting women: they were supportive of the idea,
but not now and not here.
146
According to the paper, “It is essential for
the well-­being of the white race, and also
for that of the colored race, that the two be
educated separately. There is sufficient danger
of ultimate racial amalgamation now, without
increasing that danger through the mingling of
the races in school, colleges and universities.”
In the end, the court case did not proceed
and the state established a graduate college
for African Americans at the Virginia State College for Negroes (later Virginia State University)
in Petersburg, as well as a fund to send black
students out of state for course offerings not
otherwise available to them at home. As for
Alice Jackson, she used money from the fund
to earn a master’s degree in teaching from
Columbia University. She taught in Florida and
then at Howard University over a long career,
dying in 2001 at the age of eighty-­eight. Her
family donated her papers to Alderman Library,
and according to her son, Julian T. Houston, a
superior court judge in Massachusetts, the decision had a “certain poetic justice” in the way
that “it enables her to achieve in death that
which she sought but was denied in life.”
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62
O
n April 21, 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt
came down from Washington, D.C., to
visit his son Franklin Jr., who was then attending law school at the University of Virginia. The
Danville Bee reported that “an undercurrent
of excitement” surrounded the president’s
overnight stay in Charlottesville. “While the
visit is strictly a family affair,” the paper told its
readers, “a few intimate friends of the Roosevelts have been invited to meet the president
at his son’s home this afternoon. Among those
invited are some university officials, including
President and Mrs. John Lloyd Newcomb.”
This tea service, which was owned by the Newcombs, may have been used at the event.
JOHN LLOYD
NEWCOMB’S TEA Newcomb had been president of the University since the death of Edwin Anderson
SERVICE
Alderman in 1931. For two years he had served
as acting president while the Board of Visitors explored the possibility of finding someone better known to take the position. Some
wag joked that the visitors had approached
everyone but Benito Mussolini before finally settling on the decidedly unglamorous
Newcomb. A native of Gloucester County,
Newcomb had earned his bachelor’s degree
from the College of William and Mary before
studying engineering on Grounds. He joined
the engineering faculty in 1909, then went on
to become a full professor in 1910, the dean of
engineering in 1925, and assistant to the president in 1926. In 1933, he received the first Raven Award ever bestowed on a faculty member.
When hired, Newcomb was seen as the
conservative choice. “There’s no telling what
somebody brought in from the outside would
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mild palsy and “was obviously embarrassed in
making public appearances.”
do,” the historian Virginius Dabney wrote.
A resolution passed by the Student Senate
promised that Newcomb would not “wish to
foist on Virginia any experimental schemes
or ultramodern theories of education,” and
this, apparently, was what the Board of Visitors
desired.
According to Dabney, Newcomb the engineer was the opposite of Alderman the
reformer: “Whereas Alderman was a spectacular personality, sometimes pompous and too
conscious of his exalted state, Newcomb was
an able administrator and shy.” Like William
Barton Rogers, who helped found the engineering school in the 1830s, Alderman was
“aware,” Dabney writes, “of his wizardry with
words.” Newcomb, by contrast, suffered from a
And yet President Newcomb’s leadership
managed the University through the Great
Depression and World War II, when money was
short and enrollment shrank significantly. During his tenure, Scott Stadium and the Bayly Art
Museum were constructed and Alderman Library opened. Newcomb died in 1954, at which
time he was revealed to have been a member
of the ultrasecretive Seven Society. The group
gave the University $17,777.77 to establish a
loan fund in his honor, and Newcomb Hall was
named for the former president in 1958.
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his wool cape was worn by Juanita Easley
when she was a student nurse at the University of Virginia Hospital. Nursing students
wore such capes whenever they ran across the
street in the winter to the hospital from the
nurses’ dorm, which was in McKim Hall. Easley,
whose initials are on the cape’s collar, served as
a second lieutenant in the Army Nursing Corps
during World War II before going on to work in
the University Hospital as the head nurse in the
maternity ward.
NURSING CAPE
The University of Virginia Hospital opened
on Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, April 13, 1901.
Its twenty beds were served by a handful of
locally recruited women, and it immediately
became clear that a training program for
nurses was required to staff the facility properly. Toward that end, the University of Virginia
Hospital School of Nursing accepted its first
four students that autumn. This was not an
academic department of the University but a
vocational training program, and one that grew
quickly. By World War I, the hospital housed
two hundred beds and the school enrolled
sixty-­eight student nurses. By 1924 there were
three hundred beds and ninety students.
That same year, in 1924, Josephine McLeod
began her tenure as the superintendent of
nursing. A graduate of Randolph-­Macon Women’s College and the Johns Hopkins Hospital
School of Nursing, she emphasized the need
for a proper medical education beyond the
traditional role of following doctors’ orders. In
1928, after helping to raise funds and fend off
the objections of University faculty, McLeod established the Sadie Heath Cabaniss Memorial
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School of Nursing, which President Edwin Anderson Alderman housed in the Curry School
of Education. The three-­year undergraduate
program was offered in addition to, rather than
instead of, the nursing training already provided at the hospital, and it lasted until 1954,
when the programs combined.
McLeod, who remained superintendent of
nurses until 1937 and was responsible for the
addition of capes to the standard uniform,
helped demonstrate the quality and value of
women as academic students. According to
the historian Barbara M. Brodie, McLeod’s
“ability to raise the standards of nursing care
and education, and the success of Cabaniss’s
students to meet the University’s academic
standards challenged the view that professional nursing was solely a womanly vocation
devoid of intellectual substance.”
During World War II, the Army officially
designated the University of Virginia a Cadet
Nurse Corps school, whose graduates—including Juanita Easley—were required to serve
as nurses in either the military or underserved
communities. By the end of the war, 94 percent
of the University’s nursing students had opted
to join the corps.
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64
I
n 1888 Grover Cleveland became the first
sitting president to deliver a commencement address at the University of Virginia.
Fifty-­two years later, on June 10, 1940, Franklin
D. Roosevelt became the second president to
speak at Final Exercises, and went on to make
news beyond the scope of this cover story in
the University of Virginia Alumni News.
ALUMNI NEWS
ARTICLE ON
THE “HAND
THAT HELD THE
DAGGER” SPEECH
On June 10, with German Panzers on the
outskirts of Paris, Italy declared war on France
and Great Britain. On the train from Washington to Charlottesville, Roosevelt worked over
his speech, adding five typewritten pages, and
scribbling in between the lines words that soon
would race across the globe: “On this tenth
day of June, 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.”
The foreign policy scholar James M. Lindsay
notes that similar phrasing appeared in a version of the speech produced earlier in the
day, but aides had deemed it to be inflammatory. On the train, however, Roosevelt decided
against diplomatic restraint and reincorporated
the original image.
It was raining that evening, so Roosevelt
delivered the speech not in the McIntire Amphitheatre but inside Memorial Gymnasium,
which was built in 1924 and named in honor
of the students and alumni who had died in
World War I. Considering this background, it
was somehow fitting for Mem Gym to play host
at such an important moment in the run up to
American participation in World War II. According to a report in the following day’s New York
Times, “When Mr. Roosevelt gave deliberate
emphasis to this nation’s sympathies with those
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who were staking their lives in the fight for freedom overseas,” the otherwise “grim-­faced”
audience, which included Franklin Jr., “broke
into the wildest applause, cheering and rebel
yells.”
In the previous year, Roosevelt had steered
American foreign policy down the middle of
the road. But with this speech, Time magazine
declared, “the U.S. had taken sides. Ended was
the myth of U.S. neutrality.”
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65
A
PHOTOGRAPH
OF CAROYL
BEDDOW
GOOCH
lthough for much of the twentieth century women were not admitted to the
University of Virginia as academic students,
they could serve as computers. This is what the
astronomers at McCormick Observatory called
them in a nod to their ability to work out by
hand often exceedingly complex mathematical
calculations. Caroyl Beddow Gooch, pictured
here, was one such computer. She arrived on
Observatory Mountain in 1942, “at the ripe old
age of eighteen,” as she told the University of
Virginia Magazine in 2015. “I was always interested in figures,” she noted. “It always amazed
me that no matter how often you did it, two
and two always came out to be four. Eventually
I discovered that accounting made more sense
to me than anything else and I wound up working as an accountant for a number of years.”
Before entering her profession, Gooch
spent four years at McCormick, working for
Samuel Alfred Mitchell, the Canadian-­born
Caroyl Beddow and Dot Watson outside McCormick Observatory, 1944
Caroyl Beddow and Dot Watson outside McCormick Observatory, 1944
154
chief astronomer, known for his work on solar
eclipses, and Rupert Wildt, a German who
studied planetary atmospheres. “The machines
we used and the things I calculated have
mostly left my head now, but I remember the
people clearly,” Gooch said. “Dr. Mitchell was
a dear, sweet man. And when Dr. Wildt first
came to work here, he clicked his heels and
bowed to me.”
Two astronomers who were also at McCormick during that period were Alexander N. Vyssotsky and his Harvard-­educated wife, Emma.
“Emma was more hands‑on than the fellas,”
Gooch told the magazine. She offered additional teaching and support to the computers, who were already well-­paid professionals.
Gooch, a native of Charlottesville, remembered
the condescension of one professor’s wife, who
once told her, “You certainly do carry on conversation well for a town girl.”
Gooch and the other computers were measuring the distance between Earth and the
stars. Using glass-­plate images captured by
the telescope’s twenty-­six-­inch lens, they noted
how stars shifted against the background of
other celestial objects—what scientists call
stellar parallax—and used those measurements to calculate distance.
“It became a family joke,” Gooch said
about that encounter with the professor’s wife.
“Anytime I accomplished anything, my mother
would say, ‘You do that so well for a town girl.’ ”
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T
his manuscript of the Robert Frost poem
“The Gift Outright” arrived in the mail
at the Virginia Quarterly Review in 1942 along
with two others, “Time Out” and “To a Moth
Seen in Winter.” “You may of course put them
in any order you please,” Frost told the editor,
Archibald B. Shepperson, explaining that he
had publicly read all three the year before in
Williamsburg.
“THE GIFT
OUTRIGHT” BY
ROBERT FROST
According to Frost, “The Gift Outright”
showed the poet “meditating my country.”
In that respect, it was a good fit for VQR.
Founded in 1925 under the editorship of James
Southall Wilson, the publication was intended
as a “national journal of discussion,” albeit one
that cultivated a distinctively southern, liberal
outlook. In some respects its existence was
an attempt at proving to the nation that the
South held the possibility of an intellectual life
beyond the Lost Cause. This could be treacherous ground to stake out at the time.
In 1929, Wilson commissioned a piece about
race relations from R. Charlton Wright, a retired
South Carolina newspaper editor who had
crusaded against lynching. Wright composed
an essay on racial mixing that he immediately
thought better of, telegraphing the editors that
his article was “highly dangerous and must not
be published under any circumstances.” When
VQR finally did publish “The Southern White
Man and the Negro,” in the spring 1933 issue,
it nevertheless defended segregation and the
laws against interracial marriage.
“The Gift Outright” largely steers clear
of such complications, offering up a somewhat tidy history of early America, from
156
Massachusetts to Virginia. First we claimed the
land, the poem says, and then the land claimed
us. It made us Americans, once we abandoned
our English roots and surrendered fully to a
territory “still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, /
Such as she was, such as she might become.”
When Frost published his next collection,
“might become” was changed to the more
optimistic “will become.” Then, on January
20, 1961, the aged poet stood in the winter
sunlight at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration
and, rather than struggle through his specially
prepared verse, recited from memory “The
Gift Outright.” At the end, and apparently at
Kennedy’s suggestion, he changed “will become” to something more conditional, “would
become.” It implied work yet to be done and a
nation still and always in progress.
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67
D
PARACHUTE
WEDDING DRESS
uring World War II, the U.S. government
created medical units from teams of
doctors and nurses working in hospitals. The
University of Virginia’s contribution to the effort
was designated the Eighth Evacuation Hospital and stationed in North Africa and Italy. On
May 26, 1945—the same month the war ended
in Europe—a nurse in that unit, First Lieutenant Hilda “Frankie” Franklin, married Captain
Richard P. Bell Jr., with whom she served. This
dress was made from a silk parachute. While it
is not known whose idea the dress was or who
sewed it, Joan Klein, the curator of historical
collections at the University’s Claude Moore
Health Sciences Library, said the bride likely
wore several layers underneath, the silk being
quite sheer.
During World War I, the University had
sponsored Base Hospital 41, which in the few
months between July 26, 1918, and the Armistice on November 11, had served nearly three
thousand patients outside Paris. At the beginning of World War II, the dean of the medical
school, Dr. Harvey E. Jordan, worried that the
University did not have adequate faculty and
students available to staff another such hospital. Dr. Staige Davis Blackford, an associate
professor of medicine, countered that it would
be possible with only a few faculty and resident
staff, so long as they were joined by alumni
and other physicians with ties to the University.
Jordan approved and the Eighth Evac, as it was
called, assembled its hospital in the spring of
1942 under Colonel Blackford’s command.
The Eighth Evac boasted 750 beds and 417
personnel, including 47 commissioned officers
158
and 52 commissioned nurses. Attached to
General Mark W. Clark’s Fifth Army, the hospital always seemed to be near long lines of
marching soldiers, or so was the recollection of
Captain John L. Guerrant. “Numerous passing
University of Virginia alumni stopped to visit in
hope of seeing an old friend,” he later wrote.
“They might enjoy a meal in our officer’s mess
which had an excellent reputation. Colonel
Blackford was very gregarious and an excellent
conversationalist.”
War was hard work, though, and before her
silken-­parachute nuptials, Frankie Franklin
slogged through regular twelve-­hour shifts
while Richard Bell labored in surgery. From
1942 to 1944, the hospital cared for more than
forty-­eight thousand patients, twice as many as
were admitted to the University of Virginia Hospital during the same period. After returning
home the Bells settled in Staunton, where they
raised four sons. Richard died in 1969, Frankie
in 1994.
159
68
J
JOHN COOK
WYLLIE’S
JAPANESE
RADIO SET
ohn Cook Wyllie, the University librarian
from 1956 to 1968, was nearsighted. Having been snubbed by all branches of the U.S.
military in 1941, he instead joined the American
Field Service, a youth exchange program that
operated a wartime ambulance service. He
eventually earned a field commission from the
British in North Africa before finding a spot as
a communications officer with the U.S. air corps
in Burma. There, he was awarded the Legion of
Merit, the citation for which refers to his “great
courage and resourcefulness” in setting up
observation posts near enemy lines and calling
in close air support. At war’s end, he returned
home with this bullet-­riddled Japanese radio
as a souvenir.
A Florida native, Wyllie began working at the
University of Virginia library as an undergraduate, hiring on as a reference librarian after his
graduation in 1929. From there he rose through
the ranks, curating first the library’s Virginiana
collection and after the war its rare books.
Wyllie was “not particularly gregarious,” his
friend Randolph W. Church recalled. He cultivated an “exacting game of table tennis,” was
fascinated by cryptograms and anagrams, and
displayed a “genuine talent with the drawing
pen.” He was “rugged in countenance, sensitive in spirit and sometimes angry in mind. . . .
He had no place for fools.” In 1956, he became
the University’s twelfth librarian.
“Most books, it is true, find their chief end in
the noble function of being read,” Wyllie told a
gathering in 1946, “but the man who says that
a book is only for reading is to me a pervert of
the same order and only of a different kind as a
160
man who says that a woman is only for sleeping
with.”
According to his biographer, Matthew J.
Bruccoli, “Wyllie was ostentatiously omni­
bibliophilic. There were twenty-­eight books
by his bed the night he died—all of which he
was reading.” He spent little money on himself
except for purchasing two packs of cigarettes a
day. On the library, however, he spent well, introducing what Bruccoli calls an “all-­embracing
acquisitions policy not shared by some of his
associates who claimed that ‘John’s junk’ was
not worth the expense of cataloguing.” His
habits may have served as the origin of the
Special Collections library’s practice today
of acquiring all sorts of artifacts of material
culture, from books to Barbie dolls to Post-­it
notes.
Wyllie died in 1968.
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T
EDWARD
STETTINIUS’S
GAS MASK
his gas mask belonged to Edward R. Stettinius Jr., whose brief stint as secretary
of state, from December 1944 to June 1945,
came at a time when such an accessory was
considered a diplomatic necessity. The son of
a successful businessman, Stettinius attended
boarding school in Connecticut and then, from
1919 to 1924, the University of Virginia. He left
without receiving a degree, having been “extremely prominent and popular,” according to
the historian Virginius Dabney, but “a decidedly mediocre student.” Using family connections, he hired on at General Motors and
by 1931 had risen to vice president. Over the
next decade-­plus, he worked in the Roosevelt
administration on various New Deal projects
while also becoming chairman of the board of
U.S. Steel.
A British colleague, noting Stettinius’s prematurely gray hair, which contrasted sharply
with his bushy black eyebrows and blue eyes,
described him as looking “like a dignified and
more monumental Charlie Chaplin.” In February 1945, he accompanied an ailing Roosevelt
to the Yalta Conference, in Crimea, where they
met with Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin to
establish the parameters of the postwar world.
A few months later he led the U.S. delegation
to the United Nations Conference, and after
Roosevelt died President Harry S. Truman appointed him the first U.S. ambassador to the
new international body.
Upon his retirement, Stettinius settled in
Virginia, the native home of his mother, Judith
Carrington, and served as rector of the University from 1946 until 1949. His “zeal for the
162
university was such that, as rector, he injected
himself into matters that were really beyond his
proper sphere,” wrotes Dabney in Mr. Jefferson’s University, without elaborating. Stettinius
succumbed to a heart attack in 1949, just a few
weeks after his forty-­ninth birthday.
In 2015, on the seventieth anniversary of the
founding of the United Nations, the University
of Virginia established the Edward R. Stettinius
Jr. Prize for Global Leadership. Its inaugural recipient was Madeleine Albright, the first female
secretary of state.
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70
E
ED ROSEBERRY’S
CIRO-­FLEX
CAMERA
d Roseberry purchased this twin-­lens,
synchronized-­shutter Model F Ciro-­flex
in 1946 for $123 at a camera shop on East
Main Street in Charlottesville. This was shortly
after he had returned from his years of service in World War II and resumed his studies
at the University of Virginia. The Ciro-­flex, with
its synchronized flash, boasted cutting-­edge
technology, and soon Roseberry was busy
documenting student and town life for Corks
and Curls and for his own amusement. He was
nicknamed Flash, and a profile in the University of Virginia Magazine described him as a
“ubiquitous” presence along Rugby Road on
the weekends, moving from one fraternity party
to another. “On Sundays, he posted for sale
his weekend’s pictures in the windows of Eljo’s
[a local men’s clothing store], then located on
University Avenue,” the magazine noted. “It
wasn’t uncommon for the gathered crowd of
appreciative onlookers to snarl traffic in front of
the store.”
Self-­portrait of Ed Roseberry, 1967
Ed Roseberry’s photo of football players carrying coach Bill Elias off the field at
Scott Stadium, 1961
164
After earning a degree from the Commerce
School in 1949, Roseberry continued to shoot
pictures, creating what is now considered an
iconic body of work—images of concerts,
fraternity parties, and athletic events that
together add up to a valuable history of the
University at mid-­century. A 1955 photograph
of Carroll’s Tea Room, for instance, shows a
crowd of young men in ties, and a few women,
too, lifting their bottled beers in salute of the
cameraman. A 1961 shot captures football
players carrying their coach, Bill Elias, off the
field at Scott Stadium after the team snapped
a twenty-­eight-­game losing streak by defeating
William and Mary. Four years later, Roseberry
documented a commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of the Great Fire when the
University’s official hostess, Mama Rotunda, set
a cake ablaze. And in 1975 he produced the
definitive portrait of Easters, the mud-­soaked
annual drunken free-­for-­all that was finally
banned in 1982.
Roseberry’s picture of Easters, in particular,
has become inextricable from our understanding of the event, much as did Rufus W. Holsinger’s unforgettable image of the Rotunda fire. To
borrow from Susan Sontag, such photographs
are not simply documents of experiences, but
experiences themselves, ways for the University community to mark what we deem to be
important and to ignore what we don’t.
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71
O
PAVILION
GARDENS
ne of Thomas Jefferson’s earliest plans
for the University actually placed gardens on the outside of his U‑shaped configuration of pavilions and student rooms. Even when
he revised his design to add the East and West
Ranges, he continued to situate the gardens
on the outside. Only a third revision, sketched
in June 1819, put the gardens in their now-­
familiar position, between the pavilions and the
ranges. A month after that, yet another revision
established the composition’s final form. This
time Jefferson added serpentine walls—just
one brick thick but taking strength and stability
from their curves—that divided one garden
from another.
By 1948, those walls were “crumpling,” according to the Garden Club of Virginia, and
at their meeting on July 5, 1948, members
resolved to restore the bricks and plant the
gardens. The Club’s records declare, “With the
feeling that this tremendous and thrilling task
would involve all the qualities of the members
toward the Greek idea of excellence, [this plan
of action] was approved. The work would begin
with the gardens between the Pavilions and the
West Range.”
The Garden Club hired Alden Hopkins, an
expert on Colonial Revival landscape architecture, and he completed work on the West
Range in 1952. He died in 1960 before finishing
the East Range. His assistant took over, however, and the East Gardens were dedicated in
1964. They were planted only with flora known
to Jefferson, and six of the gardens were outfitted with sheds. In addition, six gardens (corresponding with the six hotels) were divided in
166
half by new serpentine walls, creating a formal
pavilion garden and a utilitarian hotel garden.
Merton Spire, a gift from the University of
Oxford, sits in the hotel garden of Pavilion VI,
near Hotel D, and is surrounded by trees and
shrubs reminiscent of those at Monticello. Next
door, the Garden Club retained at least part
of the boxwood garden first planted in the
nineteenth century and restored by the Garden
Club of Albemarle in 1913 with the addition of
tree peonies, roses, and southern magnolias.
Jefferson’s serpentine walls have captured
the imagination of many visitors. In 2006, the
former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day
O’Connor used the image of the walls to illustrate the way in which the separation of church
and state in the federal government has not
always been straightforward. The Serpentine
Society—an LGBT alumni group founded in
1998—wins for wit, however. “The walls aren’t
straight,” they say, “and neither are we!”
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T
BOWIE KUHN’S
STUDENT ID
CARD
his identification card once belonged to
Bowie Kent Kuhn, who graduated from
the University of Virginia School of Law in 1950
and went on to become the fifth commissioner of Major League Baseball. His tenure,
which lasted from 1969 until 1984, changed
the game forever. Teams played at night for
the first time and television revenues skyrocketed. The league expanded into Canada and
split into divisions, and players won the right
to free agency. They also went on strike for the
first time—for thirteen days in 1972 and for fifty
in 1981. Kuhn’s relationship with the players’
union leader, Marvin Miller, was difficult at best.
“There was about Miller a wariness one would
find in an abused animal,” Kuhn later wrote in
his memoir. “It precluded trust or affection.”
Not everyone loved Kuhn. His obituary in
the New York Times suggested that “he was
often self-­righteous, pompous and inconsistent
in his rulings, and subservient to the owners
who hired him.” One of those owners, Charles
O. Finley, of the Oakland Athletics, called him
“the village idiot,” while another colleague
more generously described him as “ever the
do-­gooder,” obsessed with the “integrity of
the game.” Kuhn’s management approach,
meanwhile, was to always handle the law and
the lawyers himself. That confidence may have
stemmed from his days at the firm of Willkie
Farr and Gallagher, and before that his stint in
law school at the University.
Kuhn doesn’t offer much in the way of
schoolboy recollections in his memoir, Hardball, published in 1987. In fact, he devotes just
a single sentence to his time on Grounds: “My
168
years at the University of Virginia law school
completed my educational career.” He does
not even mention serving on the Virginia Law
Review. The law school, however, had long
been one of the nation’s best. In a 1937 article,
Life magazine took exception to nearly everything about the University of Virginia except its
architecture and its law school.
Law professor John B. Minor, who negotiated the University’s safety during the Union
occupation, died in 1895, by which time he
had been joined on the faculty by his son,
Raleigh Colston Minor, and a great nephew,
William Minor Lile. The latter, an Alabama native, founded the Virginia Law Register in 1896,
became the school’s first dean in 1904, and
helped found the Virginia Law Review in 1913.
He also is credited with greatly expanding
the law library. Upon Lile’s retirement in 1932,
Armistead Dobie took over, a “flamboyant
character,” according to the historian Virginius Dabney, who spoke in rapid-­fire bursts and
revved up crowds ahead of football games.
When he left for the federal bench in 1939, his
successor was F. D. G. Ribble, a direct descendant of John Marshall, the first chief justice of
the U.S. Supreme Court. Ribble is credited with
doubling the school’s enrollment and strengthening its reputation.
Ribble was dean until 1963 and died seven
years later. His onetime pupil, Bowie Kuhn,
died in 2007.
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T
his page from a scrapbook that once
belonged to Walter N. Ridley contains
a photo of Ridley walking the Lawn in 1953,
as well as international newspaper clippings
about Ridley’s graduation, with high honors,
from the Curry School of Education. The event
drew such notice because Ridley, a native of
Newport News and the grandson of slaves,
was the first African American to earn a degree
from the University of Virginia and the first to
receive a doctorate from a southern state university.
WALTER RIDLEY’S He was not, however, the first African
American to attend the University. After the
SCRAPBOOK
Board of Visitors denied admittance to Alice
Jackson in 1935, the lawyer Gregory Swanson sued for and won admittance to the law
school in 1950. The historian Virginius Dabney,
who was then editor of the Richmond Times-­
Dispatch, awkwardly acknowledges this milestone: “The black was well received, according
to various opinions, but he remained in school
only a few months and dropped out in July
1951.” Dabney tells us that President Colgate
W. Darden believed that Swanson “was not sufficiently well prepared for graduate work.”
Such was the habit of white supremacy at the
University of Virginia at that time that a member of the Virginia Bar, as Swanson was, could
be considered unprepared for the state’s law
school. The wife of a faculty member recalled
how a friend expressed trepidation toward
integration. “Maybe it won’t be so bad as you
fear,” she replied. “Negroes have come a long
way lately.”
170
However—grudgingly, and only under court
order—it was the University that had moved,
and continues to move. In 1987, the Alumni
Association established a merit-­based scholarship program for African American students,
naming it in Ridley’s honor. The next year, after
a career that included service as president of
the National Education Association, Ridley received the Distinguished Curry School Alumnus Award.
171
74
I
EVERARD
MEADE’S
CANNON
n 1955, as the first cohort of business students sat listening to opening-­day remarks,
they were jolted by a loud blast from a second-­
floor window of Monroe Hall. Professor Everard
Meade had shot off this small, two-­foot cannon
from his office window. Meade hadn’t informed
anyone of his plans, but he meant the blast to
symbolize the new program’s rigor and dynamism. A descendant of a Revolutionary War
soldier and the cousin of an Everard Meade
whose death during the Civil War landed him
in John Lipscomb Johnson’s University Memorial, the twentieth-­century Meade had been a
writer and producer for the radio shows of Jack
Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and
Fred Astaire. He also had enjoyed a successful
advertising career before becoming a teacher.
The idea for a graduate school of business
had originated in 1946 with Tipton R. Snavely,
a professor of economics and an expert on the
writings of George Tucker. Snavely had noticed
that no such school yet existed in the South,
and after Rector Edward R. Stettinius urged the
matter forward President Colgate W. Darden
eventually embraced it as well. As with the
hospital nursing school, the hope with the business school was to keep its well-­trained graduates at home, in the South, where they could
do the most good. This motivated the business
community, which helped raise more than a
million dollars for the school. The General Assembly matched it, in addition to setting aside
a yearly appropriation.
The business school found its first dean at
Harvard, where Charles C. Abbott was the
Converse Professor of Banking and Finance.
172
Dabney tells us “was almost certainly Colgate
Darden.” A former governor and congressman,
Darden served as president from 1947 to 1959,
during which time he opened the University to
a much broader range of students, including
African Americans. Initially apprehensive, the
faculty came around, in 1958 presenting him
the Thomas Jefferson Award for his leadership. The business school was named for him in
1974. He died seven years later.
He arrived on Grounds in September 1954. “I
think Mr. Darden wanted the school to open
September 15,” he said later, “but I said I
wanted a year to open, and we opened in 1955
with 38 students.” After Abbott asked Darden
several questions he didn’t understand, the
president finally said, “Well, why don’t you do
what you damn well please; everybody does
here, anyway.”
According to Abbott, “That’s all the instruction I ever had.”
The school’s finances were kept afloat in
those early years through the generosity of an
anonymous donor, whom the historian Virginius
As for Everard Meade, the professor with
the cannon, he died in 2000, at which time the
Darden School of Business named its annual
award for creative leadership in his honor.
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75
I
n September 2015, Vanity Fair published
an article about the University of Virginia in
which the writer Sarah Ellison argued that the
University pretends to be the “safe version of
the South,” one where a certain elitist, aristocratic element holds sway and prevents the
sorts of scenes one associates with the Deep
South. “In the past,” she wrote, “U.Va. students
looked at Ole Miss, with its Confederate flags
hanging in fraternity-­house windows, and felt
superior. Sure, you might have come across the
occasional Confederate flag at U.Va. too, but
they were hardly ubiquitous and were usually
met with a roll of the eyes.”
CROSS BURNED
IN SARAH-­PATTON “In the Deep South,” Ellison continued, “the
shadowy side is actually out in the sunlight.
BOYLE’S YARD
Thomas Jefferson’s U.Va. prefers the shadows
to be in the shadows.”
The reality is a bit more complicated. This
cross was burned on the front lawn of Sarah-­
Patton Boyle, wife of a University drama
instructor. Boyle had authored a magazine
article that appeared in the Saturday Evening
Post in February 1955. Optimistically headlined
“Southerners Will Like Integration,” it made
the case that more good people supported
the end to racial discrimination than anyone
suspected. As evidence, she cited the case of
Gregory Swanson, the University’s first African
American student, who, according to Boyle,
“suffered, during his entire stay here [in Charlottesville], no unpleasantness related to his
race.”
In fact, Swanson had been prohibited from
living on Grounds, isolated in the dining areas,
174
ignored in his classes, and banned from attending dances. Nevertheless, Boyle wondered
whether “the whole story of Southern racial
prejudice . . . is vastly exaggerated in our own
minds, as well as in those of outsiders.”
The answer to that question came when the
harassing phone calls and hate mail began to
arrive shortly after the appearance of Boyle’s
essay. And a year and a half later, amidst
the battle over the desegregation of public
schools, a cross was burned on her lawn. Boyle
was not the only one to whom this happened:
crosses were also burned on the lawn of Carr’s
Hill, at that time the home of President Colgate W. Darden, who was not known to be an
enthusiastic supporter of integration at the
University.
A woman named Nell Battle Lewis authored
one of many bitter public responses to the
Saturday Evening Post essay, accusing Boyle of
attempting to “sell the region down the river.”
Lewis’s half brother, the former University dean
Ivey Foreman Lewis, had once delivered a
tirade on Grounds against immigrants and African Americans. Neither of these actions had
taken place “in the shadows.”
Sarah-­Patton Boyle was so shaken by the
cross-­burning incident that she contemplated
suicide. Nevertheless, she recovered well
enough to display this cross with pride on her
living room wall.
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76
I
CARROLL’S TEA
ROOM MENU
n 1937, in a special issue devoted to colleges, Life magazine declared the University of Virginia “the most beautiful campus
in the country.” Underneath its gorgeous
photographs, however, the magazine offered
a scathing critique. The University’s “broad
gentlemanly attitude . . . does not breed or
encourage scholars,” the editors wrote, adding
that the school “does not enjoy top rank as
an educational institute.” Still, the magazine
noted, its students “are indisputably among
the ablest college drinkers in the country.”
It seems appropriate, then, that 1937 was
also the year that Clyde Spencer built an
Amoco station out in the country, north of
Grounds. Within two years he had switched
from gas to barbecue and beer, calling the new
place, with a cheeky bit of faux gentility, Spencer’s Tea Room. During the war business suffered and Spencer sold out to Carroll Walton,
who changed the name to Carroll’s Tea Room.
(The sign out front admitted, “No Carroll, No
Tea, No Room.”) When the boys returned
home from overseas, the Tea Room became
one of the most notorious drinking establishments in the South.
“The congestion was fierce,” the historian
Virginius Dabney wrote of Carroll’s, “for the
two rooms were only twenty by thirty feet, and
hundreds of students patronized the place
every night.” An article in the Cavalier Daily,
published in 1973, recalled “the third-­year
law student Sherwood Liles who passed out
in the back room, yet didn’t fall down for 28
minutes—it was so crowded he just moved
along with the mob inside.” (For the record,
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Sherwood E. Liles III, Class of ‘57, went on to
earn an engineering degree.) The paper also
described a “tragic event” in 1953, when a
scuffle between patrons led to a knife being
pulled and a pistol fired: “The tea room went
wild! Students dived under tables, ran out the
back entrance and jumped out the window.”
As the Richmond Times-­Dispatch reported,
however, the whole incident was staged in
order to provide realistic witnesses for a moot
court trial. All but one of the forty-­two participants ended up telling an inaccurate story
about what had happened.
177
A crowd of patrons raise a toast at Carroll’s Tea Room, 1955
Of the student customers, Dabney acknowledged that “some imbibed too freely,
of course,” but went on to underscore “the
undergraduates’ usual penchant for exaggerating the extent of inebriation in former days.”
Tall tales, however, don’t account for the fact
that Carroll Walton nearly lost his liquor license
in 1951 for serving intoxicated customers,
convincing him to sell the place to two football
players from the Class of ‘51: Harrison “Chief”
Nesbit and Joe Palumbo. (Palumbo was an
All-­American whose number has since been
retired by the program.) In their six months of
ownership, the Tea Room sold more than three
thousand kegs of beer.
Still, Dabney insists that Carroll’s Tea Room
offered a gentlemanly ambience. “It was indeed a place where friends met for a seidel
or two of lager in an atmosphere of jollity and
good fellowship,” he writes, “and some of
them got drunk.”
In 1956, Coleman Graham bought the Tea
Room and transported it via flatbed truck up
Route 29 in order to make room for Barracks
Road Shopping Center. The state’s Alcoholic
Beverage Control Board refused Graham a
license, however, because the Tea Room was
just too “noisy and disorderly.”
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A
t a press conference in Charlottesville
on February 15, 1957, someone asked
the Nobel Prize–­winning novelist William
Faulkner why he had accepted an invitation
to be a writer-­in‑residence at the University of
Virginia. “It was because I like your country,”
he drawled. “I like Virginia, and I like Virginians. Because Virginians are all snobs, and I like
snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little left to meddle with
you, and so it’s very pleasant here.”
FAULKNER’S
TYPEWRITER
Armed with this Remington Standard typewriter and his pipe, the author of The Sound
and the Fury and As I Lay Dying arrived on
Grounds playing the role of mischievous truth-­
teller. A few months later, when an engineering
student asked him about the snobs comment,
Faulkner backtracked. “Well, that was—I
thought that we were more or less informal
then and I didn’t really mean that as a serious
observation,” he said.
Faulkner may have meant nothing by it when
he called Virginians snobs. But not quite a
year later, he delivered a lecture to members
of the Raven and Jefferson Societies in which
he scolded them for their treatment of African
Americans and their resistance to integration,
suggesting that if Virginians and their flagship
university wanted to see themselves as leaders,
then they should lead.
“Let it begin in Virginia,” Faulkner said,
“toward whom the rest of us are already looking as the child looks toward the parent for a
sign, a signal where to go and how to go.”
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77
As Edwin Yoder wrote in the Virginia Quarterly Review in 1997:
As a Nobel prizewinner and the preeminent Southern writer of his time, Faulkner was expected to
have inspiring and edifying things to say about
race. His prestige assured that what he said about
the color line, however casual or strange, would be
closely noted. I doubt that Faulkner welcomed this
eminence or the temptation it offered to visit the
soapbox. But it was a gentleman’s duty he could no
more dodge than Thomas Mann, for all his distaste
for political engagement, could dodge the issue of
Nazism.
Rarely had such a challenge to the University’s raison d’être been heard on Grounds.
Faulkner urged the students to see the University as “not just a dead monument to, but the
enduring fountain of [Jefferson’s] principles”
with regard to “the relationship of man with
man.”
You are “the messenger,” Faulkner told the
students in 1958, a few years after the first African Americans had enrolled and more than a
decade before the first women. “Show us the
way and lead us in it. I believe we will follow
you.”
180
181
T
78
COFFEE CARAFE
he first dean of the Darden School of
Business, Charles C. Abbott, seems to
have been a larger-­than-­life figure. “As a student at Harvard he had edited the Lampoon
and composed the class poem,” notes the historian Virginius Dabney. “Endowed with a keen
wit, he described himself as a ‘carpetbagger,’
but his birth in Kansas and his schooling in the
North were no hindrance to his success in Virginia. An admiring writer for the Alumni News
said he was ‘the only dean at the university
who keeps ready access to Beechnut chewing
tobacco.’ ”
Abbot also was a fan of coffee. In 1955, he
initiated what was, for its time, the unconventional idea of a coffee break after the day’s first
class. It was an opportunity for students and
faculty to come together to socialize and talk
about intellectual and other University matters.
The Class of 1958 presented this carafe to the
school in honor of the tradition that came to be
known as “first coffee.”
Forty-­five years later, in 2003, first coffee
continued, and the Darden School’s dean, Bob
Bruner, affirmed its importance with a quote
from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “Social psychologists tell us that we cannot truly be persons
unless we interact with other persons,” King
wrote in 1962. “All life is interrelated. All men
are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
What does this have to do with coffee?
“Quite simply this,” argued Bruner. “First Coffee affirms that Darden (or any enterprise) is
greater than the sum of its parts. Each of us
wants to be part of something greater—First
182
Coffee affords a daily reminder of what that
‘something’ might be.”
Still, business must always be business,
as demonstrated by a commenter on Dean
Bruner’s blog who latched onto King’s
rhetorical flight, writing: “I suspect an enterprising Darden graduate will soon market a
new clothing design under the label ‘garments
of destiny.’ ”
183
79
M
ary Hall Betts, popularly known as
Mama Rotunda, served as the University’s official hostess for nearly twenty-­five years,
starting in 1958. On various occasions at the
Rotunda she wore this hand-­painted muslin
dress with the south elevation of the Rotunda
on one side and the north-­side Jefferson statue
on the other. A derby hat, altered to resemble
the Rotunda, completed the outfit.
MAMA
ROTUNDA’S
OUTFIT
Betts combined her passion for the past with
a flair for the dramatic. In 1965, for instance,
on the seventieth anniversary of the Great Fire,
she baked a large cake shaped like the Rotunda and Annex, covered it in lemon extract,
and lit a fire that blazed so high and bright
that, according to the Cavalier Daily, the event’s
participants had trouble extinguishing it.
In 1961, Betts, whose husband Edwin M.
Betts was a biology professor who helped to
edit a collection of Jefferson’s letters, created
a remarkable booklet designed for tours of
Grounds—A Visit to the University of Virginia—
that featured her own calligraphy and drawings. Much of the history she tells in its pages
is recognizable. In fact, at the very beginning
she depicts Jefferson with his famous telescope, describing how “he would look through
[it] toward the University four miles away in the
valley below.”
She describes the cornerstone ceremony
in 1817 (“conducted with Masonic rites”) and
the founding, in 1907, of the Colonnade Club.
There is a great deal about architecture, of
course, and mention of the then ongoing
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185
garden restorations. Edgar Allan Poe makes an
appearance, as does Woodrow Wilson, who
lived at 31 West Range. Lafayette and Jefferson
dine in the Rotunda, which eventually goes up
in flames, which leads to the Stanford White
restoration, which . . . well, the story goes on.
But if readers know it, it’s probably not because
they have slogged through Philip Alexander
Bruce’s five volume history of the University
but, more likely, because they have been exposed to Mama Rotunda’s masterful distillation, or its influence. Like her outfit, Betts’s A
Visit to the University of Virginia was designed
in large part to invoke both the drama of the
story and the love the author felt for the University. As she writes at the end of her booklet, with a nod to Bruce, “A cordial invitation
is extended to visit Mr. Jefferson’s University,
which in its notable growth, lengthens with his
shadow.”
Mary Hall Betts poses with the statue of Jefferson inside the Rotunda, 1976
186
187
80
T
BICE DEVICE
his strange-­looking contraption is an electronic pseudophone, which demonstrates
how the brain localizes sound by altering the
spot from which a given noise seems to originate. “It’s what would happen if you placed
your right ear on the left side of your head,” its
inventor, Raymond C. Bice Jr., once explained.
A self-­described tinkerer, Bice updated an earlier creation by Paul T. Young and used it in his
psychology class at the University of Virginia—
or what students called “Bice Psych.” The
hundreds of demonstration aids their professor
invented became “Bice Devices.”
Bice served in the Navy during World War II
and studied at the University of Wisconsin
before arriving on Grounds in 1948. In addition to teaching his popular psychology class,
he also became what one account calls “an
administrative jack-­of‑all-­trades,” serving as
associate dean of the College of Arts and
Sciences (1958–­69), assistant to the president
(1969–­90), secretary to the rector and Board of
Visitors (1969–­90), and the University’s history
officer (1991–­98).
In 1954, Ray Bice succeeded Richard R.
Fletcher as the University’s director of admissions. Bice later explained to the Cavalier Daily
that President Colgate W. Darden had come to
him “concerned because Virginia high school
students were not coming to U.Va., and he
wanted information about the applicants.”
“The paperwork and files were tremendous,”
Bice recalled, so he did what he did best: he
188
invented something. In this case, it was a computer cobbled together using counters from
pinball machines confiscated by the police
department in Danville, south of Charlottesville. It was, perhaps, the ultimate Bice Device
in a career that spanned fifty years. Bice died
in 2011.
189
81
T
CONTROL PANEL
FROM THE
UNIVERSITY’S
FIRST COMPUTER
he first computer at the University of
Virginia was a Burroughs 205, purchased
in 1960 and installed in the basement of the
physics building. The same type of computer
appeared in the Batcave of the 1960s television
series Batman. “This marvelous little machine
filled an entire room, and required a full-­time
engineer from Burroughs to maintain it,” recalled Joel Rose, who worked as a programmer
in the summers of 1962 and 1963. His father,
Willie Lee Rose, was a history professor. “It had
a gazillion vacuum tubes”—1,800, to be precise—“so I imagine a lot of the maintenance
involved just replacing burned-­out tubes.”
According to Rose, users signed up for a
time slot, fed the computer tape, and then
walked away with the printed output. “I can
tell you, they prepared pretty hard for that
time slot,” he wrote. “One stupid mistake and
it might be tomorrow before you got another
crack at it.”
Rose recalled one occasion when representatives from a Burroughs rival visited the computer lab. (For the sake of the anecdote, Rose
gives the company the fictional name JCN.)
“This was a company with a very different
culture than that which we enjoyed,” he wrote.
“I mean, they wore suits!” A “much braver”
colleague of Rose’s “wrote a short program
for the printer, which typed out ‘JCN sucks’ repeatedly. He made it perpetual by splicing the
paper tape into a closed loop. It was running
when the Director and the JCN rep emerged
from the office to tour the computer room.”
In 1964, the University purchased its second
computer, a Burroughs 5000. Bill Wulf, who was
190
awarded the University’s first PhD in computer
science in 1968, told the University of Virginia
Magazine about the end of the Burroughs 205:
“My dissertation adviser, Alan Batson, declared
we would have a ‘bring your own screwdriver’
party. We took the machine apart.” Wulf ended
up with the computer’s control panel, and it
has been in his possession for nearly fifty years.
191
82
I
UNIVERSITY MACE
Robert Gooch
n the Middle Ages knights used the mace as
a weapon, but over time it came to symbolize, rather than actually demonstrate, power
and authority. Such is the nonviolent role of
this particular mace, presented to the University of Virginia by the Seven Society on April
13, 1961. Crafted by the Swiss watchmaking
company Patek Philippe, it features pictures of
the Rotunda, serpentine walls, The Aviator, and
other University-­specific emblems, and comes
out from under lock and key only for important functions such as convocation and Final
Exercises.
The first to carry the mace was Robert K.
“Bobbie” Gooch, a political science professor
who in 1961 served as the University’s grand
marshal. A native of Roanoke, Gooch quarterbacked the University of Virginia football
team in 1914–­15 and then attended Oxford as
a Rhodes Scholar. After service in World War I
and a short, unsatisfying stint in business, he
returned to Oxford, earning a PhD in 1924.
That same year he joined the faculty of his
alma mater in Charlottesville, and in 1932 he
succeeded law school dean Armistead Dobie
as grand marshal.
According to one historian, Gooch was an
Anglophile who so appreciated the pomp
and circumstance of Oxford that he affected
a British accent for the rest of his life. He “was
one of the worst teachers I ever had,” complained Staige Davis Blackford, the longtime
editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. Others,
however, saw Gooch as “the living symbol of
the university”: outgoing, argumentative, and
ever loyal to the Orange and Blue. Whatever
192
his eccentricities, he cared about the quality of
education on Grounds.
Gooch believed that over the years the Academical Village had become essentially a country club, so with the support of President John
Lloyd Newcomb and in collaboration with two
other Oxford men on the faculty—Stringfellow
Barr and Scott Buchanan—he developed what
came to be known as the Virginia Plan. Unveiled in 1935, it called for a curriculum based
on the “great books” and an Oxbridge-­style
tutorial program for honors students. By
integrating math and science with the more
traditional liberal arts, the Virginia Plan “expanded the Western Canon and its influence,”
according to the historian William Haarlow, and
addressed the University’s perceived academic
drift
Gooch remained on the faculty, and served
as grand marshal, until his retirement in 1964.
He died in 1982.
193
83
T
he telephone manufacturer Stromberg-­
Carlson presented Virginia’s two-­millionth
telephone to President Edgar F. Shannon Jr. in
1967. He used the phone in his office during his
tenure as the University’s fourth president.
EDGAR
SHANNON’S BLUE
AND ORANGE
PHONE
A native of Lexington and the son of an English professor at Washington and Lee University, Shannon attended his father’s school and
graduated summa cum laude. Shannon read
Tennyson at Oxford and then served in the
Pacific during World War II. In 1942, he went
down with his ship, the USS Quincy, but was
rescued from the water. By war’s end he had
earned a Bronze Star and ten battle stars. In
1956 the thirty-­seven-­year-­old Shannon joined
the faculty of the University of Virginia as an English professor, and three years later he was selected by the Board of Visitors to be president.
As the rector presented Shannon to the faculty,
one professor reportedly whispered, “This is all
very fine, but who the hell is he?”
Shannon proved to be an ideal successor to the democratizing Colgate W. Darden,
who had encouraged the enrollment of a
wider swath of Virginians while also seeking
to weaken the role of fraternities. One faculty
member had gone so far as to accuse Darden
of making the University “a catch-­all for everybody who wants to go to college in the state.”
Darden’s reply: “That’s what it’s supposed to
be.” Under Shannon, that trend continued,
with enrollment more than tripling, from about
4,200 to about 14,500. Women enrolled for the
first time as undergraduates in the College of
Arts and Sciences, and African Americans enrolled in substantial numbers.
194
President Shannon also proved to be an
academically ambitious administrator. He established the Echols Scholars program in 1960
to help recruit the best students, while also increasing the percentage of students who graduated in four years, from just under 60 percent
in 1959 to 75 percent in 1963. He restructured
the administration, emphasized research, and
grew the University physically, overseeing the
building of Wilson Hall, Campbell Hall, Jordan
Hall, McLeod Hall, Gilmer Hall, the Fiske Kimball Library, University Hall, and the Alderman
Road dormitories.
Shannon’s most remarkable moment as
president, however, had nothing to do with
enrollment numbers or new buildings. Instead,
it came on May 10, 1970, when, from the steps
of the Rotunda, he faced four thousand jeering
and angry students.
195
84
W
THE SALLY
HEMINGS
UNDERGROUND
NEWSLETTER
hen the United States invaded Cambodia at the end of April 1970 and, a
few days later, four unarmed college students
were killed by National Guardsmen at Kent
State University, protests erupted at the University of Virginia and across the country. On
May 5, a Tuesday, about a thousand students
rallied at the Rotunda before marching to the
president’s house on Carr’s Hill. Others briefly
occupied Maury Hall, home to the Navy ROTC.
They honored the dead at Kent State and decried the war in Vietnam, and some called for a
strike in hopes of shutting down the University.
As protests continued throughout the week,
a rock band kept everyone company on the
Lawn while a few students handed out free
peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Over at
East Lawn Room 50, meanwhile, members of
the University of Virginia Strike Committee distributed copies of an anonymous underground
newsletter called the Sally Hemings. The title,
of course, served as a dig at Thomas Jefferson and charges that he had fathered several
children by one of his slaves. It also provided a
bit of context to one of the students’ principal
demands: that the University increase its admission of African Americans.
All week the University teetered on the edge
of violence, and to deal with the possibility President Edgar F. Shannon Jr. transferred
law-­enforcement powers on Grounds from the
University to the state police. When students
gathered on Friday for a “honk for peace” rally,
a University administrator informed them that
they would be arrested according to the state
riot control act if they did not disperse within
196
three minutes. When the students refused,
more than sixty were loaded into the back of a
Mayflower moving van. An arrested law student
later recounted that his onboard companions
included “a tuxedoed fraternity man who had
just dropped off his date and was returning
to his house, a be-­slippered buildings and
grounds man who lives in a cottage behind
President Shannon’s house,” and a number of
Lawn residents. Their experience—disbelieving, according to that law student—probably
helps explain the wry injunction, at the bottom
of the Sally Hemings, vol. 1, no. 10, to “remem ber the M ayflower .”
On Monday, Shannon addressed the student
body from the steps of the Rotunda. His message was both remarkable and unexpected: He
praised the students for their concerns about
the war, criticized the “anti-­intellectualism
and growing militarism in the national government,” and specifically condemned President
Richard M. Nixon’s decision to invade Cambodia. He even called out Virginia’s powerful
U.S. senators, Harry F. Byrd Jr. and William B.
Spong Jr. In Richmond, the Times-­Dispatch
called Shannon’s words “maliciously warped”
and designed only “to appease the irresponsible radicals.” In Charlottesville, though, about
half of the University’s ten thousand students
signed their names to a statement accompanying the speech.
“The wrinkled old men in Richmond are rumbling and are out for blood,” the Sally Hemings
reported. But for now, at least, peace reigned
on Grounds.
197
85
B
COEDUCATION
LAWSUIT
y the late 1960s women had long attended the University of Virginia—primarily as nursing and education students—but
they had never been enrolled in the College
of Arts and Sciences, and according to the
prevailing wisdom, that was how it should be.
Thomas Jefferson had believed in the education of women, but only as a means of helping
them become proper ladies. They were too
emotional and obsessed with novels to benefit
from a university education, he believed, and
therefore should be excluded. In 1968, the
history professor Julian Bishko would call on
Jefferson for support when he questioned the
wisdom of admitting women to the College,
asking, “Should we not seek, here at Virginia,
to maintain the College’s predominantly masculine character and its moderate size as essential to preserving our traditions and fulfilling
our founder’s intention towards us?”
Many faculty, students, and alumni thought
so, believing that women would ruin the traditional character of Mr. Jefferson’s university.
“If they let women in here in more than token
numbers it would be the end of the university,”
a student told the Richmond Times-­Dispatch.
Nevertheless, President Edgar F. Shannon Jr.
pushed ahead with plans for coeducation.
Shannon was a forward-­looking president,
and in 1969, the exclusion of women at public
schools could only be considered backward.
That year the Board of Visitors voted to
accept women but only gradually, capping
their number after ten years at 35 percent of
the student body. Dissatisfied with this rate of
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199
change, four women from Charlottesville who
previously had been denied admittance—Jo
Anne Kirstein, Virginia Anne Scott, Nancy L.
Anderson, and Nancy Jaffe—filed suit. On
September 30, 1969, after a contentious legal
battle, a federal court ruled in their favor, allowing them to enroll in the College of Arts and
Sciences. The court mandated full coeducation
within three years, and in September 1970, 450
undergraduate women, 350 of whom were first-­
years, arrived on Grounds.
“After 150 years of a traditional past,” the
Corks and Curls editors wrote, “this has truly
been the Year One of a different place.” To
many women, it was not a welcoming place.
“Two hundred leering potential rapists camped
outside the women’s dorms in early September
did not make for good public relations,” one
of the first woman students wrote in the yearbook. Virginia “Ginger” Scott, a plaintiff in the
court case, agreed that her time on Grounds
had proved difficult. “I guess it depended
on what sort of relationship you wanted with
men,” she said after graduating in 1973. “If you
wanted a normal one of mutual respect, the
school was the farthest thing from it.”
Yet in many respects change came quickly.
Women began participating in club and then,
by 1973, varsity sports. They joined the Raven
Society and became IMPs. Although back
in 1967 members of the Honor Society had
predicted their own extinction under coeducation, women joined that, too. In 1972, Cynthia
Goodrich became the first woman student to
live on the Lawn.
The historian Virginius Dabney noted at
least one area in which women surpassed their
male counterparts. “The hundreds of girls
who entered in 1970 seemed to want to outdo
the boys in the slovenliness of their dress,”
he opined. With everyone’s “patched, faded,
frayed blue jeans” and “long, unkempt hair,”
it was, as far as Dabney was concerned, the
“sloppiest” year on record.
200
Front page of the Cavalier Daily for September 14, 1970, noting the court-­mandated
inf lux of new female students at the University
201
86
E
FIRST WOMEN’S
NCAA
CHAMPIONSHIP
arly in the era of coeducation, the male
writers at the Cavalier Daily declared,
“Most girls look rotten in slacks.” What would
they think of women dressed in all the different types of athletic uniforms they wear on
Grounds today? By 1973 women’s tennis, field
hockey, and basketball were all varsity sports,
and in 1977, the University awarded an athletic
scholarship to a woman for the first time. At
the inaugural NCAA women’s cross country
championships in Park City, Kansas, in 1981,
the Cavaliers took home this trophy. It marked
the first national title for a women’s team at the
University of Virginia. The second came just a
year later at the women’s cross country championships in Bloomington, Indiana.
Jill Haworth Jones ran for both of the championship teams and said the 1982 win was the
sweeter of the two. “The second year, two
of our best athletes, Lisa Welch and Aileen
O’Connor, couldn’t compete due to injury,” she
told the University of Virginia Magazine, “and
the coach at Stanford was quoted in a newspaper as saying that we should mail him the
trophy. But we won.” And handily so, 48–­91.
According to the historian Virginius Dabney,
the cheerleading squad had the most difficulty
transitioning to coeducation. He reports that
the sport’s “male contingent was aghast at the
mere thought of girls in that role” and “concluded that cheers led by none but girls were
a bit too much.” So did the University. In 1974
administrators divided the twenty-­person cheer
squad equally between men and women.
Since 1982, women’s teams have won five
NCAA team championships for the University:
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in lacrosse (1991, 1993, 2004) and rowing (2010,
2012), not to mention numerous ACC championships. Jill Haworth Jones praised Title IX, the
1972 federal law that required equal opportunities for women, for making women’s sports at
the University possible. “I know it opened up a
huge door for me personally,” she said. “It has
changed a lot of women’s lives.”
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87
F
HOMER STATUE
or reasons that are not entirely clear, 1974
was a banner year for streaking in the
United States. On April 2 a man named Robert
Opel famously ran naked across the stage on
the live television broadcast of the Oscars,
prompting the actor David Niven to comment
on Opel’s “shortcomings.” Even earlier, however, students were streaking across Grounds.
According to the historian Virginius Dabney,
several young men appeared in various states
of public undress on February 20 of that year.
“One, clad only in a Batman’s cape, sprinted
across the Lawn, while another raced through
Alderman Library wearing a motorcycle helmet
and nothing else.” A few days later a group of
students, including at least one woman, staged
a “mass streak” near the McCormick Road
dormitories but failed in their attempt to set a
world record.
Despite three arrests, a tradition was born.
According to the University of Virginia Magazine, “Custom has it that before one takes a
degree from the University, he or she is to run
naked from the steps of the Rotunda down the
740‑foot Lawn, kiss the statue of Homer, and
streak back up the Lawn.” Some suggest that
it is important that streakers peer through the
Rotunda’s keyhole at the statue of Jefferson
before donning their clothes again.
The statue of Homer came to the University
in 1907 as a gift from John W. Simpson, of New
York City, at the request of the sculptor, Sir Moses Ezekiel. A native of Richmond, Ezekiel was
the first Jewish student to attend the Virginia
Military Institute, fighting alongside his fellow
cadets at the Battle of New Market during the
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Civil War. Ezekiel went on to study sculpture in
Berlin and Rome, where he was forced to live in
Jewish ghettos. When he created the statue of
Jefferson that stands on the north side of the
Rotunda, he inscribed the tablet the founder
holds with various names for God: Jehovah,
Brahma, Atma, Ra, Allah, Zeus. The idea was to
honor Jefferson’s commitment to freedom.
In 1937, the student newspaper College
Topics reported that a few drunk first-­years
“forsook their pajamas” and streaked from the
Corner to their rooms. Concluded the paper:
“That’s Jeffersonian Democracy for you.”
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88
E
THE LAST
EASTERS T‑SHIRT
asters began around 1898 as a series of
formal dances and athletic contests held
the week following Easter Sunday. Students
pledged not to drink alcohol, and as late as
1950 the event was “notable for its decorum
and general good behavior,” according to the
Alumni News. By the 1970s, however, Easters
had changed, devolving into a giant drunken
party held in the Madison Bowl, a playing
field flanked by several Rugby Road fraternity
houses. There, students used hoses and fire
hydrants to create artificial mudholes and then,
according to the historian Virginius Dabney,
“slithered around prone in the gunk.” He
continues: “Large cans of grain alcohol mixed
with fruit juice added zest to the occasion as
the boys and girls got mud in their eyes, in
their hair, down their necks, and all over their
clothes.”
It was even worse for University administrators. Thousands of young men and women
from around the country flocked to what
Playboy magazine called the “Best Party in the
Country,” creating for the University problems
of public safety, reputation, and plumbing. Students returning to their dormitories clogged
the pipes with all of their mud, leading one
dean in 1972 to pronounce that year’s Easters
“the worst mess I’ve seen in my fifteen years
here.”
The peak Easters bacchanal may have come
in 1975, with a crowd of fifteen thousand or
more organized by the thirty-­six members
of the Inter-­Fraternity Council into a single,
enormous party patrolled by security volunteers wearing specially made hot pink Easters
206
T‑shirts. Five hundred cases of beer had been
purchased at discount ahead of time and
stored in a walk‑in refrigerator at Saint Anne’s,
a nearby boarding school. Beers were then
sold for a dollar apiece.
The party, according to one of the organizers, “was great!” But while the T‑shirts caught
on (pictured here is the last one), Easters itself
was on the way out. After 1976, the party was
banned from Mad Bowl and in 1982, after an
investigation by the University and complaints
from residents on Rugby Road, the school
banned altogether what Dabney called “these
stupefying collegiate gambols.”
Ed Roseberry’s photograph of Easters, 1975
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89
T
PEACH BOWL
COKE BOTTLES
hese two Coke bottles commemorate the
University of Virginia football team’s first-­
ever appearance in a postseason bowl game,
in 1984. After coming back from a 10‑point
halftime deficit, the Cavaliers, then under third-­
year head coach George Welsh, defeated Purdue 27–­24 to finish the season 8–­2–­2. During
Welsh’s nineteen years at Virginia, he became
the most successful coach in school history,
leading the team to twelve bowl games and a
pair of ACC championships. Before his arrival,
Virginia had come close to cutting the football
team altogether.
In 1951, former Virginia quarterback Bobbie
Gooch helped write a report recommending
that the University dispense with intercollegiate
football and all athletic scholarships. According to the report, “big time athletics” had
corrupted the ideals of sport and resulted in
certain “reprehensible” consequences, such
as the University paying coaches’ salaries and
young instructors feeling pressure to pass star
athletes. The faculty of the College of Arts and
Sciences voted overwhelmingly in favor of the
Gooch Report’s recommendations, leaving the
future of football at the University uncertain.
The historian Virginius Dabney refers to what
followed that vote as a “monumental hullabaloo.” The Alumni Association found Gooch’s
methods to be “unreasonable, unfair and
misleading,” while the Alumni News declared
that the report’s conclusions “smelled of high
treason.” President Colgate W. Darden joined
the fray, pointing out that neither state nor University money funded athletic scholarships and
208
that football players graduated at a rate only
slightly below the University average (64.2 percent compared with 67.3 percent). That winter,
however, the president nevertheless declined
the team’s first-­ever invitation to a bowl game,
the Cotton Bowl. The politician and former
player Charles R. Fenwick publicly agreed with
that decision, arguing that bowls were meaningless and suggesting the team eliminate
spring practice, too.
In the end, not much came of the Gooch
Report, but the football coach quit a year later.
This plunged the program into what Dabney
calls “a staggering series of almost unbroken
defeats.” In fact, that 1984 Peach Bowl team
recorded only the third winning record for the
University since 1952. Under Welsh’s leadership, it would become just one of many.
209
M
ohamed Arafa, a global media consultant who received a PhD from the
Department of Anthropology in 1986, gave
this commemorative plate to the University of
Virginia’s International Center in 1988, when he
and his wife returned to Grounds and stayed at
the center as guests. Arafa, a native of Egypt,
had this plate specially made for the center,
and it continues to hang in the foyer.
90
INTERNATIONAL
CENTER
EGYPTIAN PLATE
Located on University Circle, the International Center was founded in 1972 with help
from Lucy Hale, who began work at the University in 1960 as an assistant foreign-­student
adviser. About fifty-­five foreign students lived
on Grounds at the time, and the culture shock
was intense.
“You have to remember,” Hale later explained, “at the time U.Va. admitted only white
students and very few females. And it was set
in this sleepy southern town.” It could be a
difficult environment for foreigners, and some
students buckled under the pressure. In 1960,
an international student shot and wounded his
girlfriend before killing himself. When, after a
few years, Hale became the foreign student
advisor—the University’s first female, nonacademic administrator—she vowed to do
more to help international students thrive on
Grounds.
Some administrators were supportive, she
recalled. “But others, though they were not
overtly hostile, did not pay any attention to
what a woman was saying or wanted to do.
I loved the university and felt that it was my
university. But I began to feel that I was an alien
in my own environment. I could identify with
210
the foreign students.” In 1977 the University
refused funds for a proposed celebration of the
sesquicentennial of the University’s first foreign
student, Fernando Bolívar, the nephew and adopted son of the South American hero Simón
Bolívar. The younger Bolívar was a student in
1827 before returning to his native Venezuela.
(Casa Bolívar, the University’s Spanish-­language
house, was named in his honor in 1996.)
Hale was successful, however, in establishing
the International Center, which quickly became
an important educational, cultural, and social
center for international students and visitors
to the University. The center is now named for
Lorna Sundberg, who worked as its program
coordinator for decades. Hale retired in 1986.
Twenty years later the University hosted 750
foreign students from seventy-­five countries.
211
91
T
STEVE KEENE
PAINTINGS FOR
WTJU
hese placards by Steve Keene, spoofs
on Norman Rockwell’s famous Freedom
from Want and Freedom of Speech from 1943,
were painted sometime in the early 1990s for
a WTJU rock marathon. Once a DJ for the University station, Keene found artistic success first
in Charlottesville, then in Brooklyn, mastering
what one critic has called an outsider, “slightly
manic” style that emphasizes quick and cheap
production. A Time magazine article referred
to him as an “Assembly-­Line Picasso,” but one
who nevertheless has composed album covers
for bands such as Silver Jews, the Apples in
Stereo, Soul Coughing, Pavement, and Yo La
Tengo. (Pavement and Yo La Tengo both have
members who also were DJs at WTJU.)
The station got its start in 1955 when the
honorary education fraternity Kappa Delta Pi
donated $450 to buy an old World War II–­era
transmitter. An engineering student named
Rowland Johnson took time from his honeymoon to drive up to Washington, D.C., to
retrieve the transmitter and set it up in what is
now Old Cabell Hall. The next year the station
applied for and received an FCC license, and
in March of 1957 it began broadcasting at 10
watts on the FM dial. (The University already
had an AM station, WUVA, dating back to
1948.) According to a local newspaper report,
about a hundred listeners initially tuned in,
some from as far away as Crozet.
At first, broadcasts were limited to just a
few hours a day, with the inaugural marathon
coming in January 1959, when WTJU broadcast
264 consecutive hours of music. The station
played mostly classical music in those days.
212
Jazz accounted for only a small percentage of
broadcast time; rock and roll, none. In 1969 the
station’s managers engaged in what one history calls “intense fighting” over its programming. On one side were the Beethoven traditionalists, on the other the Woodstock rebels;
the classical partisans won, at least temporarily.
The first rock music hit WTJU’s airwaves in 1971
and by 1973 it had largely taken over. That
same year the station went stereo, and in 1974
it began broadcasting twenty-­four hours a day.
In 2000, WTJU moved to its current home
at Lambeth Commons. A decade later, a new
general manager attempted to transform
the station from its traditional free form into
something more predictable and commercial,
a move that many staff members and alumni
fiercely resisted.
“Thomas Jefferson is disgusted,” one outraged listener told a local newspaper about the
proposed changes. “I promise you that.”
In the end, however, the status quo prevailed
and Jefferson’s little-­known love of indie rock
was forever validated.
213
92
T
BERNARD
MAYES’S
MARCH ON
WASHINGTON
FLAG
Bernard Mayes talks with a new graduate at Final Exercises
his rainbow flag, a symbol of the gay
rights movement dating back to the
1970s, belonged to Bernard Mayes. A professor of rhetoric and media studies at the University from 1984 to 1999, he picked it up at the
March on Washington in 1993. According to his
friend and former student Matt Chayt, Mayes
“kept this flag for over 20 years and across numerous relocations (including across the country). He used it to identify himself . . . [and] even
displayed it outside his door at the nursing
home where he spent his last two years. It was
very, very important to him to literally ‘show the
flag’ wherever he went.”
A native of London, Mayes arrived on
Grounds in 1984. He was an Anglican priest
who had read ancient languages and history at
Cambridge, worked as a journalist for the BBC,
founded the first suicide-­prevention hotline in
San Francisco, sat on the first board of National
Public Radio, and lectured at both New York
University and Stanford. As he wrote in his autobiography Escaping God’s Closet, published
in 2001, Mayes found in Charlottesville a university that “tried to change as slowly as possible and found it not too difficult to do so.”
The attitude toward gay and lesbian students
and faculty was generally not welcoming, and a
number of closeted colleagues warned Mayes
not to cause trouble. “I was dangerous,” he
wrote, “and the price of their continued support and friendship was silence.”
“He was a very openly gay man—and proud
of his gay identity,” Charlotte Patterson, a
professor of psychology, told the University
of Virginia Magazine. “He would be happy
214
administrators in order to speak “about what it
meant to be a homosexual.”
to tell you about his first husband, who was a
drag queen. That had a certain shock value at
the time at U.Va. He enjoyed that, I think, and
he also educated a lot of people in telling his
stories.”
With Patterson, Mayes started the first group
for gay and lesbian faculty and staff members
and helped to found the alumni group that
became known as the Serpentine Society (their
slogan: “The walls aren’t straight and neither
are we!”). He also convinced the faculty to support the addition of sexual orientation to the
University’s nondiscrimination policies. In response to such activism Mayes recalled “locals
who drove around with rifles and Confederate
flags and might want to hunt us down.” Rather
than retreat, he called a meeting of faculty and
In attendance were professors, accountants,
groundskeepers, and police officers. “With
as much good humor as we could muster,”
he wrote, “we told them to be afraid of us no
longer; that, as they could see, we did not have
two heads; that we were not child molesters;
and that when we made love it was much the
same way as they made love, using similar
dual-­purpose organs. Their relief was tangible.”
In 1999, the Serpentine Society established
the Bernard D. Mayes Award recognizing notable alumni and faculty for their contributions
to LGBT rights. Mayes died in 2014.
215
93
I
ABERCROMBIE &
FITCH CATALOG
n the spring of 1997, the renowned fashion
photographer Bruce Weber auditioned and
shot photos of University of Virginia students
on Grounds for Abercrombie & Fitch’s inaugural quarterly catalog. The company had been
around since the 1890s but had gone bankrupt
in 1977. Fifteen years later it rose again, this
time under the leadership of CEO Mike Jeffries, an eccentric, zealous businessman whom
Salon magazine once described as “the Willie
Wonka of the fashion industry.” His business
plan, explained, was this: “In every school
there are the cool and popular kids, and then
there are the not-­so-­cool kids. Candidly, we go
after the cool kids. We go after the attractive
all-­American kid with a great attitude and a lot
of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our
clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.”
Bruce Weber’s hallmark style of seminudity
and overt sexuality caused an uproar when
the catalog mailed in the autumn of 1997.
Soon Baptist organizations in the South were
labeling the publication pornography, and by
2001 Corinne Wood, the Republican lieutenant
governor of Illinois, had launched a boycott. “I
am asking concerned parents and citizens to
join me in boycotting this nationwide chain,”
she wrote on her website. “A&F is glamorizing
indiscriminate sexual behavior that unsophisticated teenagers are not possibly equipped
to weigh against the dangers of date rape,
unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.”
216
In 2003, the catalog ceased publication,
the target audience having “cooled on the
brand,” as one writer put it. Jeffries left the
company in 2014.
217
94
I
UNIVERSITY OF
VIRGINIA BARBIE
n 1997 the toy company Mattel released
University Barbie, one in a line of “action”
dolls that included Dentist Barbie, Gymnast
Barbie, and Astronaut Barbie. It was the company’s first attempt at marketing directly to
colleges, and according to press reports the
lucky schools were chosen according to their
enrollment and stadium size, the rankings of
their football and basketball teams, and, most
importantly, their official colors. If these included red, blue, or orange, then chances were
good that Barbie would be wearing them. Besides the University of Virginia, eighteen other
schools made the cut, including Duke, Georgetown, Miami, and North Carolina State.
University Barbie appeared at the same time
as her teeth-­cleaning, space-­exploring colleagues. These so‑called “smart” Barbies were
an attempt at updating the brand, although, as
the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd
quipped at the time, “Making Barbie smart is
like making G.I. Joe a conscientious objector.”
Dowd appeared to be relieved that University
Barbie eschewed such pretensions, instead
shaking her pom-­poms and ponytail much like
the Barbie of old.
University Barbie would seem to be a
strange fit with Jefferson’s institution. The
school’s logo is the Rotunda, which originally
served as the library, or the seat of learning.
And Grounds is a place still steeped in the
mystique of one of history’s great intellectuals.
218
While the University itself may not always have
been an elite institution, it has always harbored
elite inclinations and trappings. In the mid-­
twentieth century many students and faculty
fiercely resisted admitting a broader range
of students lest Virginia become just another
“State U,” while gripping tightly to its many esoteric traditions, such as referring to Grounds
rather than campus, or pledging adherence to
the Honor Code.
The University Barbie of 1997 demonstrates
how much the school has changed, not just
since the 1850s but even since the 1950s. Even
as the quality of education has significantly improved—in 2015, U.S. News and World Report
ranked Virginia the nation’s third-­best public
university—the University has transformed
into State U, only with decreasing state support and continued expectations of scholarly
excellence. Managing all of this has proved
challenging for the University and will probably
continue to be so.
219
95
I
KITTY FOSTER
MEMORIAL
n 1833 a free woman of color named Catherine “Kitty” Foster purchased a little more
than two acres of land just south of Grounds,
in a ramshackle community of other free blacks
and a few whites known to locals as Canada.
There she raised an impressive number of
children and grandchildren while washing
clothes for students and faculty. Her daughter Ann worked in the nearby infirmary (later
Varsity Hall) and, like the school’s janitor and
bell ringer Henry Martin, may have tended to
wounded Confederate soldiers during the war.
Kitty Foster died in 1863, but Canada persevered after her, becoming home to many of
the University’s former slaves. In fact, it was
still there after the Great Fire of 1895, when
the rector decided to close off the south end
of the Lawn in order to block views of what
he referred to as the community’s “unsightly
houses.”
In 2007, a small plaque was laid between
Pavilion I and the Rotunda honoring the African
Americans who helped build the Academical Village. Then, in 2011, President Teresa A.
Sullivan dedicated this small park and memorial on the South Lawn to Foster and her
fellow Canadians. In 1993 archaeologists had
discovered about a dozen graves in the area,
and in 2005 they found twenty more. Now a
“shadow catcher” outlines the footprint of Foster’s house and a stone wall wraps around the
unmarked graves. The site was added to the
Virginia Landmarks Register in 2016.
In 2012, an alumni group, inspired by the
Foster memorial, laid a plaque in honor of
Henry Martin. One anonymous professor,
220
referencing the paternalistic way in which the
University had treated Martin, told the University of Virginia Magazine that singling him
out only “reinforces the old pro-­slavery vision
of the loyal slave.” The group’s chair acknowledged that point of view but pledged to keep
working toward a proper commemoration of
slavery on Grounds.
with MEL, on the one hand, “comes from a
place of deep love and appreciation for the
University of Virginia.” On the other hand, she
says, “It pains me to see a place that I value so
much contradict its love of history by largely ignoring events and individuals of utmost significance to our current existence as an institution
and as a community.”
In 2010, Ishraga Eltahir, then a fourth-­year in
the College of Arts and Sciences, helped found
the student group Memorial for Enslaved Laborers (MEL), which advocates for a memorial
that is more substantial than plaques. She explained to the magazine that her involvement
In 2013, in part due to the efforts of MEL, the
University created the President’s Commission
on Slavery and the University, dedicated to exploring and responding to the legacy of slavery
at the University of Virginia.
221
O
96
n June 8, 2012, Rector Helen E. Dragas
and two other members of the Board of
Visitors walked unannounced into the office of
President Teresa A. Sullivan and demanded her
resignation. According to an account published
in the Washington Post, they told Sullivan
“they weren’t satisfied with her vision and that
she was moving too slowly” when it came to
budget cuts. She had been “a good president,” they said, “but not a great president.”
SHOE FROM
SULLIVAN
CONTROVERSY
Helen Dragas and Teresa Sullivan (seen from behind) at a June 26, 2012, meeting of
the Board of Visitors, during which the board unanimously voted to reinstate
President Sullivan
“Sullivan,” the Post reported, “was speechless.”
From its first meeting in March 1819, when
it rescinded the hire of a professor for religious reasons, the Board of Visitors had often
waded into treacherous political waters. But
it had never fired a president, and rarely had
it dealt with the level of protest that immediately followed Sullivan’s termination. Students
and faculty rallied on the Lawn, some faculty
members talked about resigning, and donors
threatened to withhold gifts. These critics and
others accused the board of acting secretively,
putting too much emphasis on raising money
and not enough on teaching. There was the
additional twist that Sullivan was the University’s first woman president and Dragas the first
woman rector.
When word leaked that Dragas had expressed concerns to Sullivan about her attire,
the New York Times wondered whether similar
complaints would have been made against a
male president. “People are very much aware
that I’m the first woman president of Virginia,”
Sullivan said. “It would be naïve to think it’s not
there as an issue.”
222
Other, larger issues were at play as well.
While the University’s student body had expanded both in terms of size and diversity
since the 1970s, state support had fallen to just
7 percent of the total budget. To compensate,
Sullivan’s predecessor, John T. Casteen III, had
boosted the endowment to $4.6 billion, but in
difficult economic times Sullivan faced pressure
to increase enrollment again. This raised fears,
as it had in Colgate Darden’s day, that the
University’s fundamental character—relatively
small and academically rigorous—was at risk.
People proudly referred to the University as a
“public Ivy,” and many came to see President
Sullivan as a defender of that image.
In the end, the visitors backed down, voting
unanimously on June 26 to reinstate Sullivan. A
few days later the president received congratulations in the unlikely form of this red shoe.
It came from the Reverends Mary and Milton
Cole, of Des Moines, Iowa, who had placed
postage on the insole and mailed it without
any packaging on July 2. Their note, written
in black permanent marker, reads: “Dear Dr.
Sullivan—if only we could click our Red Ruby
slippers together and make our way to Charlottesville we would!!! We would congratulate
you on your continued tenure @ UVA. You are a
class act! One we wish we knew! Peace.”
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97
I
THE STUDENT’S
PROGRESS
n 1996, the University of Virginia commissioned the painter Lincoln Perry to create
a mural for the lobby walls of Old Cabell Hall.
Perry’s first eleven panels, which he titled The
Student’s Progress, follow the misadventures
of Shannon, a red-­haired, violin-­playing undergraduate who attends classes and parties,
pursues her music, and finally gets her degree.
At one point she turns her ankle and drops her
violin. “The idea,” according to the artist, “is
that somehow or other she’s not waltzing down
the Lawn in majesty. She’s fighting.” After completing his work in 2000, Perry started up again
in 2005, this time depicting Shannon’s post-­
graduation life, as she becomes a professor,
raises a family, and sees her daughter attend
the University. The new panels were completed
in 2012.
Perry has said that he took influence from
Thomas Jefferson’s original design for the Academical Village. “Mr. Jefferson’s idea,” he explained, “is that you start at the Rotunda, which
is the temple of learning[;] the Lawn, which is
where the classrooms were; then he guides you
out into nature, which you see as mountains in
the distance.”
But after the Great Fire, the University built
Old Cabell Hall and closed off the south end
of the Lawn, thereby blocking the viewer’s connection to nature. According to Perry, his mural
in part represents an attempt at reviving that
original experience.
One part of the mural has proved controversial. An article in the Cavalier Daily, dated
November 20, 2014, noted that “perhaps
the best and most humorous” of the panels
224
of a gang rape on Grounds. Referring to this
part of Perry’s mural, she pronounced it “wildly
inappropriate” but noted that “so far, no one
has been particularly horrified. The mural is
proudly displayed and is prominently featured
on UVA tours.”
depicts students “drinking, flirting, getting
sick and dancing,” with one student taped to
a Rotunda column and another “sneaking out
of a professor’s bedroom” as he gives her back
her underwear. “Directly across from this party
scene is a painting of various notable professors,” the student newspaper wrote. “Props to
the University for knowing how to take a joke.”
Just five days later, though, the music professor Bonnie Gordon published a piece in Slate
magazine about allegations in Rolling Stone
The artwork, she suggested, represented just
one more example of “rape culture” at the University. However, the Rolling Stone story would
eventually be discredited, and no movement
to revise or remove this part of the mural ever
materialized.
225
226
227
98
A
fter winning the 2013–­14 regular-­season
men’s basketball ACC title, Virginia
defeated Florida State, Pittsburgh, and Duke
to win its first ACC Tournament Championship since 1976, when Coach Terry Holland and
tournament MVP Wally Walker knocked off
three ranked opponents in the Capital Centre,
in Landover, Maryland. Thirty-­eight years after
the “Miracle in Landover,” the Cavaliers—led
by Coach Tony Bennett and All-­ACC Tournament first-­team members Malcolm Brogdon
and tournament MVP Joe Harris—cut down
this net in the Greensboro Coliseum on March
16, 2014.
ACC BASKETBALL
The season had been an uneven one for
TOURNAMENT
Virginia. The team suffered early losses at
home to talented VCU and Wisconsin squads
NET
and on the road to lowly Wisconsin-­Green Bay,
Bennett’s alma mater. Then, on December 30,
in Knoxville, the Cavaliers were blown out by
Tennessee, 87–­52. What happened next has
become part of the team’s lore: Harris visited
Bennett’s house on New Year’s Eve and the
two hashed out what had gone wrong and how
best to fix it. “I realized I wasn’t being a good
enough leader,” Harris later told ESPN, and
whatever he changed, it worked. The Cavaliers won twenty-­one of their next twenty-­three
games, including that ACC Tournament title.
The run finally ended with a crushing two-­point
loss to Michigan State in the NCAA Tournament’s Sweet Sixteen.
The men’s basketball team captured another
regular-­season conference title the following
year, and they were not the only Virginia sports
team to find success. The men’s soccer team
won national championships in 2009 and 2014
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while the women’s team, featuring two-­time national player of the year Morgan Brian, finished
second in 2014. The men’s tennis team won
national championships in 2013 and 2015, and
the baseball team brought home the College
World Series trophy in 2015.
The University of Virginia has come a long
way from the infamous Gooch Report of 1951,
winning sixteen NCAA championships in men’s
sports and seven in women’s sports as of early
2016. Although Tony Bennett’s basketball team
has not yet climbed to those heights, Harris
was delighted with their ACC title. “It was an
unbelievable feeling,” he told ESPN. “I can’t
even describe it.”
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99
T
POST-­IT
NOTES FROM
ROLLING STONE
CONTROVERSY
hese Post-­it notes were affixed by students to the doors of Peabody Hall in
the wake of “A Rape on Campus,” an article
published in the November 19, 2014, issue of
Rolling Stone magazine. Their expressions of
fear and solidarity, especially among women,
reference claims made in the article by a student, identified only as Jackie, who said she
had been raped by multiple men at a fraternity party. The writer, Sabrina Rubin Erdely,
maintained that the University of Virginia’s
administration did not respond appropriately
to Jackie’s initial accusations and that a “rape
culture” on Grounds contributes to the likelihood of attacks like the one allegedly perpetrated on Jackie.
“I carry pepper spray + a pocket knife everywhere I go,” one note reads. “I am scared .”
“I don’t feel protected, and I need that to
change,” reads another.
In the aftermath of the Rolling Stone article,
however, additional reporting by newspapers
including the Washington Post demonstrated
that at least part of Jackie’s story was untrue.
Rolling Stone first admitted to discrepancies,
then retracted the article altogether, while
on Grounds students debated whether accusations of rape should always be taken at
face value, whether the fraternities had been
treated fairly, and how the University should
respond to nationwide concerns about sexual
assault on college campuses. Activists, meanwhile, worried that the message of these Post­it notes—preserved by the University’s Special
Collections librarians—was being lost.
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“Take rape seriously!” reads one. And with
all the mixed emotions understandable in a
situation like this, another declares, “God bless
UVA.”
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100
A
Virginia edition of the Washington Post,
from October 28, 1933, featured this cartoon of a Cavalier humorously challenging the
honor of a scowling cadet from the Virginia Military Institute. The two schools’ football teams
were scheduled to play that afternoon, and the
Post promised complete coverage in the next
day’s paper.
CAV MAN
The Cavalier mascot was relatively new at the
time, dating back just ten years to a student
contest held for the best alma mater and fight
songs. At the time, “The Good Old Song,”
which had originated around 1900, was not as
beloved as it is today. Neither of the two winners—“Virginia, Hail All Hail” and “The Cavalier Song”—caught on, but as the historian
Virginius Dabney points out, the contest “did
have one immediate result: It caused Virginia
teams to be called the Cavaliers. Before 1923
that term was not in use, but by 1924 it was an
oft-­heard expression and has so remained.”
Previously the football team had been known
as the Orange and Blue, those colors having replaced a Confederacy-­inflected scarlet
and gray. But if the new colors had moved the
school forward and away from the Civil War,
then the new mascot moved it back again.
Much like the idealized Lost Cause gentleman,
the cavalier is a romantic image of the aristocrat, noble and brave, skilled in equal measures
with his horse and his sword.
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Still, these are fine attributes for a mascot,
and “Cavaliers” stuck, with Cav Man becoming a familiar presence at University sporting
events over the past several decades. He does
surprisingly well, too, at representing the many
complications of the University of Virginia, an
institution founded by slaveholding aristocrats
that, in the subsequent two hundred years, has
slowly, often reluctantly democratized, taking on the commercial baggage of big-­money
athletics while still preserving an enviable academic reputation. Cav Man manages somehow to embody both the good and the bad,
wrapped up in a silly and wonderful costume.
The modern Cav Man costume
What would Jefferson think? is an enduring
question at the University, but the larger question is what we think of him and his vision for
an Academical Village. Jefferson’s creation was
predicated on the “preservation of freedom,
and happiness,” hypocritically in some ways,
but also grandly, because it left room for all
that he could not have seen or known or understood about the future. What meaning do
we plan to make of his vision today?
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