Why “Restoring Humanity”
Why “Restoring Humanity”
The name came before the work.
We were standing in a room I think was once the parlor, the floorboards were up, the plaster was open in a long ragged strip across one wall, and you could see the hand-cut nail heads where someone in maybe 1830 had decided one of the studs needed a brace. You can't be in a room like that without thinking about the hands that made it. That is the whole experience of an old house: someone you will never meet shaped the world you're standing inside of.
We knew the property had once been a school. We didn't yet know how much of the rest of the story was waiting.
What I have learned in the months since, with a lot of help, is that the school that gave this place its name was, in its time, well known enough to be written about. A reverend named Peter Carr Nelson ran it here for the better part of forty years, teaching Latin and Greek to the sons of Virginia families who could afford a classical education, and to at least one bright boy whose widowed mother could not. The boys who passed through this place became ministers, congressmen, college presidents. The name Humanity Hall was not a flourish. The humanities meant something then, the disciplines that taught a person how to be a person.
So when we started talking about a name for the blog, the renovation diary, the research record, the place where the family stories would live, Restoring Humanity came easily. It is exactly what we are trying to do, in both senses at once.
We are restoring the literal house. Walls, floors, roof. The schoolhouse itself is gone; it stood about fifty yards from the present house, and by the time the school's most distinguished alumnus, Robert Ryland, wrote his memoir in old age, the schoolhouse was no longer standing. The house that survives is the family home that grew up alongside it, and now around it. The bigger Wingfield house that once stood on this same land, the seat of the Nelsons who built much of this corner of Hanover, burned in a lightning strike about 1981. Where it stood, there are foundations. We are not restoring everything. Some of what is gone is gone.
We are also restoring the humanities, the people. Captain Edward Nelson, the immigrant who is said to have lost an eye at sea and settled here in 1718. William and Mildred Day Nelson, whose 1777 marriage bond is preserved in the old Hanover records right next to Patrick Henry's. Their granddaughter Anne Livingston Nelson, who died at three. Robert Baylor Semple, the pupil to whom Nelson gave free board and tuition because his widowed mother could not pay, who later became Virginia's great Baptist historian and whose example, a generation later, brought Robert Ryland to the same classroom. Isaac Butler, who bought the place in 1853 and began a Butler tenure that ran ninety-five years. Dr. H. B. Anderson, who married Virginia Leland Butler in 1888 and reunited two halves of the property that had been sold separately a generation earlier. Armistead "Monk" Butler, who closed out the family's time here around 1948. These people lived where we live. We have their names because real records survived, Hamlin's Nelson of Hanover, a 1990 Department of Historic Resources survey, James B. Taylor's 1837 Lives of Virginia Baptist Ministers, Semple's own 1810 History of the Rise and Progress of the Baptists in Virginia, the Butler family papers at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, a cemetery transcription by Judge Leon Bazile published in a 1967 genealogical quarterly. Almost none of that is well known. Almost all of it is recoverable.
Here is what I hope this blog will be. A record of work in progress, both kinds. A short post when we find something. A longer one when a story finally comes together. A photograph when the photograph is the story. Quotes from old letters and probate inventories when we get our hands on them. A standing invitation to anyone who cares about an old Virginia house, the classical world it was made for, or the long, patient work of bringing a place back to itself.
Amber