Humanity Hall is a roughly 150-acre property in western Hanover County, Virginia, the corner of the county that holds Patrick Henry's Scotchtown, the lost Wingfield seat of the Nelson family, and a quiet, working landscape that has changed less than you might think since the 18th century.

The house we live in was once part of a classical boys' school. The Reverend Peter Carr Nelson ran it for some twenty years before his death in 1827, teaching Latin and Greek to a generation of Virginia boys, among them Robert Baylor Semple, who became the great Baptist historian of Virginia, and Robert Ryland, who went on to be the first president of what is now the University of Richmond. Nelson himself called the school Wingfield Academy; Humanity Hall is the popular name, taken from the subject the school taught, the humanities.

The property has carried a remarkable cast of stewards since Captain Edward Nelson settled on the Little River about 1718. Generations of Nelsons. The Fontaines. The Darracotts. Two generations of physicians named Boerhaave Anderson. The Butlers, who held it from 1853 until about 1948. The Fuquas after them. The cemetery on what was once the Wingfield farm still holds William Nelson and his wife Mildred Day Nelson, and a little girl named Anne Livingston Nelson who died in 1836 at the age of three.

We are the family who lives here now. We are not the first stewards and we won't be the last, but for as long as we are responsible for this land and these buildings, we want to do right by them, and to share what we're learning as we go.

That is what Restoring Humanity is.

It is a record of the literal work: walls opened, floors repaired, the photographs of what gets found behind the lath. It is a record of the deeper work: pulling family histories out of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture and the Department of Historic Resources, walking out to the cemetery with a clipboard, sitting with a 1717 plat trying to match it to what's outside the window. It is an invitation to anyone who loves old houses, classical education, Virginia history, or simply the slow recovery of a place, to come along for the journey.

We have plans, in time, to share Humanity Hall more openly. Those plans will unfold here. For now, the blog is the beginning.