Kathleen Cabell interview 1 (2005-06-23)

              NARRATOR: KATHLEEN BUCHANAN CABELL (Mrs. Royal E. Cabell, Jr.) 
 
 
 
 
Counter Index	Topic of Discussion 
[CD 1, First Interview 6/23/05] 
0:00:0		Introductions  
0:01:10		Overview: Kathleen Buchanan Cabell’s early life 
0:03:20		First visit to Union Hill 
0:05:44		Introduction to Union Hill with Mary Ross Reed 
0:10:30		Events leading to the purchase of Union Hill 
0:16:04		Viability of moving Union Hill 
0:22:22		Architectural feature: wooden paneling 
0:27:50		Dismantling Union Hill, Nelson County 
0:29:37		Observations of Thomas Jefferson regarding Georgian architecture 
0:34:37		Architectural feature: woodwork  
0:37:22		Architectural feature: dentils, repair 
0:40:34		Architectural feature: windows 
0:44:33		Architectural feature: fireback 
[CD 2, 6/23/05] 
0:00:00	          Architectural feature: dining room, outside entry 
0:02:25		Thomas Jefferson’s visit during the Revolutionary War 
0:06:41		Architectural feature: wall finishes 
0:11:01		Architectural feature: Main staircase 
Counter Index	Topic of Discussion 
0:13:52		Architectural feature: house framing and roof  
0:15:45		Architectural feature: central hall stairway 
0:17:45		Architectural feature and furnishings: central hall 
0:21:28		The Fry and Jefferson map, original location of Union Hill  
0:25:14		Union Hill: significant events and associations  
0:28:16		Architectural feature: rear entry 
0:31:20		George Washington’s visit to Union Hill; the James River and Kanawha Canal 
0:34:05		Architectural Feature: Entry doors with applied graining 
0:36:37		Nelson County setting: land entrance and outbuildings 
0:41:29		James River Canal records; College of William and Mary 
0:45:07		Furnishings: Framed images 
[End of Compact Disk] 
 
 
Interviewer note: 
       Mrs. Kathleen Cabell provides a tour of her home, Union Hill, during the following interview.  Mrs. Cabell’s husband, Roy E. Cabell, Jr., and she dismantled this historic eighteenth century family home—built by Colonel William Cabell, between 1774 and 1777—and rebuilt the house in Goochland County.  Originally, the house was located in Nelson County. 
       Due to the format of this interview—a house tour with the narrator referencing features and objects that are visible to the interviewer—clarification for the reader is in the left hand margin of each page.  Photographs depicting referenced features are cited and included with this transcript.   
        
 
 
 
CD 1 
Interview 1, track 2 
Track time:  0.42.23 
 
0:00:10		Introductions 
	Kathryn Colwell Hill:	Today is June 23, 2005 and this is an interview with Kathleen Cabell.  We are at Mrs. Cabell’s home, Union Hill, which is located in Goochland County.  I am the interviewer; I am Kathryn Colwell Hill.  Today’s interview is going to be a little different—Mrs. Cabell and I have talked about this—in that we are going to walk from room to room of this home that they have restored.  It is a long-time family home; always has been a family home.  We are going to start Mrs. Cabell, if that is okay, with a little bit of your background, which might include: where you were born, who your parents were, maybe a bit about your education, your marriage; just a short biographical sketch and then we will start this wonderful tour of the house. 
0:01:00 	Overview: Kathleen Buchanan Cabell’s early life 
	Kathleen Cabell:  Thank you Kathy.  It is a pleasure to welcome you to Union Hill because I have a very high regard for record keepers and librarians.  When I finished college, at Agnes Scott in Atlanta, my parents had moved to New York.  I thought the whole world, anywhere, would be delighted to have me in their employ but I found out quite differently in New York.  A friend, a classmate of mine, helped me get a job at a research library very near to Columbia University.  On the next floor were Reinhold Niebuhr and all of the German and European theologians that had escaped Hitler’s terrorism.  This library, it helped me to enjoy being a record keeper again. 
	My early childhood was in the coalfields of West Virginia.  [Parents: Walter Allison Buchanan, Kathleen Denny Buchanan]  It was through my brother attending Hampden Sydney [College] that I met this nice young man named Roy Cabell, from Richmond, who kept in contact with me all of my college years and thereafter another year until we were married in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1948.  We came to Richmond in November 1948.  [The Cabell’s had three children: Royal E. Cabell III, Charles Lorraine Cabell, and Kathleen Cabell]  We built a house on Sleepy Hollow Road—it was the third house there—and that is when we got to know the builder Matt Will very well and some of his workmen. 
0:03:20		First visit to Union Hill 
       It was not until about 1977 that Union Hill came on the market and, for the second time, my husband tried to be interested.  People wanted him to look at it.  He said, “Opportunity rarely knocks the second time and so maybe this time we ought to go up and look at it.”  The house had been vacant for some years.  Cousin Lucy Cabell had lived here until the 1940s.  She was the last Cabell to have a permanent residence in this house.  After she died, the owners were Cabell family members and in order to save the house they had two families living in it, who had worked on the land.  Their descendents have been here and told me stories about that time.  
       By 1977, the house had been bought by two brother named Bass who were in the construction business—big construction: dormitories for colleges, big business buildings—and they wanted to restore it.  They bought it to restore it.  They wanted to live in it and go up there for sport hunting: bear, deer, and every kind of creature around.  Soon they found out that the house couldn’t be restored unless it was taken apart.  We call that one of the first strokes of enlightenment that we had on being able to move the house.   
       In the summer of ’77—because Roy was on the Board at Hampden Sydney— he had spent many months trying to persuade Hampden Sydney that they ought to have the house.  The builder of the house, Colonel William Cabell, had raised the funds to build the first Hampden Sydney, to establish the college up there. 
	KCH:	A very important connection. 
0:05:44		Introduction to Union Hill with Mary Ross Reed 
	KC:	Our Goochland neighbor, who we knew from living in Richmond—she had saved everything in Richmond, Church Hill, the Science Museum building, the old station—was Mary Ross Reed.  She called me up one day and said, “Oh Kathleen, I am going to ask a favor.  Would you and Roy please come up to Royal Orchard—her summer home on Afton Mountain—and we will have a delightful lunch on the terrace.  My butler will be here to serve us.  All of my things will be packed in the car and after he serves us, then I would like for you all to take me to Union Hill and he will drive back to Sabot Hill.  Mary Tyler Cheek and I have driven all around Nelson County but we find the gate locked and we don’t know anyone to open it.  We are not going to climb over the fence and enter.  Would you please do that?”  I said, “Mrs. Reed, Roy would have to take a day off—he has to find a day free—but I will tell him.”  
       Well, all of that turned out very successfully.  On the last day of July, when her vacation time at Royal Orchard was over, went drove up to Royal Orchard.  We saw the magnificent house that her father had built—Mr. Fred Scott had built this house [Royal Orchard]—and then we got in our car and Roy knew exactly where to drive to get into Union Hill.  He had the key to the driveway lock.  As we approached, we drove up on a road that is very much like the one that exists here.  
       We drove to the side of the house and came in through what was then known as the servant’s entrance.  What I saw simply amazed me.  Here was this lovely room, in the middle of which was a piece of nine-by-twelve piece of linoleum, very dirty, and nothing else.  A plain electric wire—hanging down, very black, and bare—that you just put a light bulb in was in the center of the room, but there was no electricity.  I thought, “Well, let us see what the house looks like.”  We came in and entered the central hall.  Mrs. Reed went straightaway to investigate the stairwell, and within five minutes, she turned on her heels and said to Roy, “Roy, you should save this house not only for your family but for the state of Virginia.  It is in mint condition.” (Laughter)  Whereupon I looked at her and I said, “Can you believe that Roy?”  The plaster was falling down.  The doors were so askew that you could hardly open them because the floors weren’t quite level at that point.  There was dirt everywhere.  Bits of woodwork, like some dentils, were missing; we could see that.  But, she said, “Oh no.  The woodwork is really in mint condition.  It is all here.”  We thanked her and she went outside to look at the exterior; also jumping over the fence to the cemetery because she was kin to the Mayos.   
       We went upstairs and it seemed that every room got a little more desolate and more desolate to me.  We both looked out the front windows and he said, “This really is a magnificent view, isn’t it?”  I agreed with him.  We came down and then we happily got in the car and rode off.  During the whole trip back to Richmond, Mrs. Reed could speak of nothing other than how this house needed to be saved.  We deposited her at Sabot Hill, which is just two miles down the road from where we are now, and we went on home.   
0:10:30		Events leading to purchase of Union Hill 
	The Bass brothers were contractors and we knew that we could get renovation information from them.  They were very anxious to sell the house but everything else came in the way.  My mother was ill in Dallas, Texas—I had to go to Dallas twice—and Roy had a lot of business.  We never mentioned the thought of moving this house until I was in Dallas.   
       [Following my mother’s death,] two Cabell ladies, who lived in Dallas, learned through the newspaper that I was there as my mother’s only surviving daughter.  They wanted to come to call, and they did.  They were charming ladies.  One of them was married to the then congressman of Dallas, who had been very helpful with the Kennedy accident because he was the one person there who knew exactly who to call in Washington.  I had met these two ladies before because they had been to Richmond for a big family reunion that we had, with a private train going from Richmond all the way up to Nelson [County].  We had a picnic, music on the train, and everything.  We went to the cemetery of the father of the builder of this house, the first Cabell immigrant.  That was a delightful experience.   
       These ladies and I had a nice visit.  Suddenly one of them perched a little to the front of her chair and said, “Mrs. Cabell, do you think that Union Hill could be moved?”  I said, “I don’t know anything about moving a house but I have a friend in Richmond who has moved a lot of houses and she thinks it might be moved.”   
       I said, “Why do you ask?”   
       She said, “Well my daughter has been there to look at the house.”   
       I said, “Your daughter?  When did she come, she is from Houston?  How did she find it because Mrs. Reed and Mrs. Cheek knew how to get into everything in Virginia and they couldn’t get in?”    
       She said, “Oh, it was very simple.  My daughter just flew to Charlottesville, got a helicopter, came down the James River, and landed on the low ground.  She knew where to come.  She walked across the low grounds, climbed over the fence, climbed up the hill, and all these doors seemed to be open and she just came in.”  
       I said, “That is amazing.  If she is thinking about moving it; where is she thinking about moving it to?”   
       “Well, she might move it to Houston where she lives.”   
       I thought, “Oh my goodness, Houston.”  I said, “Does she really have a plan for moving it?”   
       “Oh yes, very simple.  Her husband’s in the oil business and he plants these big rigs out in the Gulf of Mexico.  (Laughter)  She is going to have two big airplanes fly up there, land on each side of the house, jack the house up, and put a net under it and fly it to Texas.”   
       Well I was just really quite amazed at that—I am glad to record that story because that lady is obviously still alive but her mother is deceased—and I said, “That is amazing.”  So, the nice visit from the two Cabell ladies ended.   
       I kept thinking about it and thinking about it and when seven o’clock rolled around and the telephone rates went down—I am a very frugal lady and I do things in the least expensive way, if you can—I called my husband.  I said, “Roy!” I related this story to him and I said to him, “You have relatives down here who have more money than good sense.  But maybe they have better sense than we have and maybe we had better give some serious thought to moving this house.”  That was the first serious thought we had given since we had seen the house in July.   
       He said, “Kathleen, you won’t believe this, but I went into a client’s office today and his whole desk was covered with land maps of Goochland, including this land right on Dover Creek.  Do you realize that the builder of the house mentions Dover Creek?”   
       This is Colonel William Cabell, who writes in his diary saying, “I was born near Dover Creek, Goochland County in 1730, but fifteen miles from Dover.”  Well fifteen miles is a short cut in his estimation, it is more like eighteen miles.  People keep asking me, “Why did he mention Dover, it was so far away?”  Well Dover was far away but Dover was the only place in Goochland on the Fry and Jefferson map, which was the only map at that time, the only one.  That at least placed the house and placed his birth pretty well.   
0:16:04		Viability of moving Union Hill 
	Let us fast-forward and come to consideration about moving the house.  We had several good strokes of luck.  First of all, the man who talked Roy into this really was Mr. Aubry Bass, who cornered him one night at the Commonwealth Club and said, “Roy, I just want to sit with you tonight and talk about saving Union Hill.  You’re the only one to do it.  It has to be taken apart in order to restore it for modern living.  So if it has to be taken apart, why don’t you consider moving it?”   
       The reason that it had to be taken apart is that the beams in each of these main walls were huge timbers that measured anywhere from ten-by-ten to—the one in the front hall under the floor going from the front door to the back door—sixteen-by-sixteen.  Now that is a whole big tree and it was all in one piece.  Due to the weight of these panels, the house was beginning to break.  The Basses had saved it by taking big timbers to the cellar and propping that big beam up. 
        The bricks were coming to pieces on the four massive chimneys.  The one right here [living room] had bricks falling off the top of it.  East of Richmond you could make good cement using oyster shells for the lime and, at the time this house was built, there was no lime that far west.  The cement used to make these bricks, put the mortar together, was what we would call very inferior or soft.  Therefore, around each chimney, in each of the rooms, we had deteriorating material.  That was another reason the house needed to be moved to save it.  Well in restoring the house, we brought down all of the bricks that we could get in order to make the foundation out of the same style of brick laying.  All of the chimneys are made of old brick.   
       Then there was another thing that really helped us and that is that a friend of Roy’s, who had been on the board at Hampden Sydney, named Doug Fleet—Douglas Fleet was a tremendous preserver of history and buildings and had helped Mrs. Reed save some houses on Church Hill, where they had bought homes and redone them—had caused an architect to go up from Lynchburg to Union Hill and measure and draw every single room and every single molding, the depth and profile.  We just felt lucky.  We had come across some land that we could put the house on, we had the blueprints, and we had everybody’s blessing to save the house; most everybody in the Cabell family wanted this house saved.   
       Many years ago, Cousin Robert Cabell—who lived on Monument Avenue right next to the Branch House, in the next block—had founded the Cabell Memorial Foundation.  Roy had helped do that as his lawyer.  His main purpose was to establish a tax-free organization in order to have some money to move this house, which is what Cousin Robert really wanted.  He wanted to save it because he felt very keenly about his roots.  Unfortunately that [Foundation] didn’t help us any because we were private owners.   
       That fall we took Mr. and Mrs. Matt Will with us up to Union Hill to look at the house.  Mr. Will had built our first house, the first house we ever constructed.  [Mr. Will] looked it all over and we sat down in the front on some folding chairs and talked about it.  He said, “Roy, the house can be moved but I wish you had done it ten years ago because it has deteriorated.”  So we had these events that occurred that we thought were just indicative for us to do this.   
       Now understand, all of our children were married; we had no children at home.  The point I am trying to make is that it never was in our hearts to want to restore a house.  Some people say, “Oh, I’ve always wanted to do this.”  Well, this was not our pet dream by any means.  However, it seemed that unless we rebuilt it the whole interior was going to be dismantled and sold through an antique company; somebody wanted the staircase; somebody wanted the paneling from this room; and we knew that some room was going to California, because of the style of the paneling.   
0:22:02		Architectural feature: wooden paneling 
       Now, we have learned that this is the only Colonial manor house standing that is decorated with the same style of wainscoting all over the first floor.  It is all standard room to room.  That is contrary to the way most houses were constructed.  You know there is a little ditty, “Big house, little house, colonnade, and kitchen,” think of Mount Vernon with its kitchen out and with its arms and colonnades.  You had to start out with a small house first and send your workers there to level the trees, cut the wood, and do all of that.  Well that didn’t happen with Union Hill.  This was Colonel William Cabell’s second house.  His first house was near this, we think, on the same piece of land overlooking the James River.  His father was dying at about the time that he undertook this and he knew that his father’s estate was going to be dispersed between his four sons, he had that coming.  Colonel Cabell had picked out the timber to make this house and had it cut up.  He was the one who paid the indentured servants to come over from England and do this carving.  Every room downstairs is standard and every room upstairs is standard.  
       There are three different types of buildings from Colonial times that have raised wood paneling.  The most prominent type is the courthouses.  If anybody has ever looked at Matlock on the television and seen the courthouse, you’ve seen the raised wood paneling that was in courthouses, most courthouses have raised wood paneling.  The second type of building is churches.  You go into a church and you see raised wood paneling.  Then in homes, but particularly in the dining room because people go into a dining room to converse.  What good is a meal if you can’t sit down and hear each other?   
       Focus on the sense of hearing.  Each one of these panels sits in a rail and they are moveable.  The panels are made of wood and in the wintertime, when the house gets very dry, they pull in and you can see the edge that is not painted.  Right now, it is damp outside—there is a lot of moisture—and they’ve gone in.  Notice the pegs here in the fireplace that are not painted.  A couple of months after we had moved in, my wonderful carpenter came—his name was Bob Johnson and he had worked on our first house and so we knew Bob, knew we could trust him—and he said, “Mrs. Cabell, I have found these pegs in my tool kit and I know exactly where they go because I couldn’t find them when I put up the paneling in your living room.”  He came in here and put the pegs in the fireplace.  This whole breast of the fireplace came down in just three pieces because all he did was take the pegs out; no damage was done to the paneling. 
	KCH:	May I make a comment for the future reader or listener?  I think that I will, if it is okay with you, come back and photograph each area that you are talking about.  Thus, in the future, the readers can visualize this for themselves.   
	KC:	Well, that will be fine.  I do a whole slide show on the building of the house.  We were honored once by an out-of-state national organization.  We have the story on film, many stories, and that needs to go somewhere and be saved.   
	KCH:	Okay.  We will talk about that in a bit, how to document for the listener. 
	KC:	Right after Mr. Johnson had put these pegs in, I had my first visiting group here—they were a group from a museum in Baltimore where we have some good friends, the Walter’s Art Gallery—and I apologized to them for the pegs here being brown.  I said, “I have got to paint them,” but they said, “Kathleen, don’t ever paint them because we can now see exactly how the woodwork is put together.”    
0:27:50		Dismantling Union Hill, Nelson County 
	The wonderful carpenter Bob Johnson—who for forty years worked for one contractor, Mr. Will, shared this comment of Mr. Will’s about taking the house down—.  Mr. Johnson had a team and his team lived right here, Bob’s house is within three or four miles of this house.  Every day they went all of the way up to Nelson County, which is ninety miles, and Mr. Johnson numbered the house.  He numbered the house and then they took the house down.  The important part is that he knew how to put it back together.  Since it is all standard woodwork, unless you got it just right it was going to be a mess.  Mr. Will made this comment about taking down the woodwork.  He said, “When you mark it, Bob, come to a corner.  Don’t make a straight line around the house, around the woodwork, because a straight line is a straight line is a straight line.  In the corners, make them angle, mark one curve, mark them top, mark them bottom, and then when those meet you know you have the right pieces of wood.  I had never thought of that.  The house, because of the bevels, is like living in a violin.  The curves of a violin are like the curves on your grand piano.  They are there for a purpose and it is to enhance the sound.  
0:29:14		Observations of Thomas Jefferson regarding Georgian architecture 
Thomas Jefferson said that “a cubed room”—this is a cubed room; it is twenty by twenty, but not twenty feet tall, don’t think that it is a pure cube—“a cubed room offers the most convenient habitation for humans because of its size,” it being twenty by twenty.  
      He took the cubed room and put it in the middle of his summerhouse.  I can show you the floor plan of the house so that you can understand.  Here is the floor plan, you see.  Around the cubed room he put octagonal rooms so he could read his books all day long, follow the sun with light.  He knew this [Union Hill’s] style of architecture, called Georgian, but he was very much opposed to it for the reasons of light and heat.  If we took down the valances on the curtains and you came in here when the sun was shining, you would have to wear a brimmed hat because the sun would be so bright in your eyes.  Also, you only get sun on one side of the house, on one side.  I wanted the sun for our back rooms because I knew that they would be the rooms that the family used the most and that has turned out to be true.  His other disagreement with this style of architecture was that though the staircase did get you upstairs it also drew all of the heat up.  When the electricity has gone out, we have relied on logs in each fireplace; each room has a fireplace.  We have nine working fireplaces in this house; the last one is in the basement for the warming oven.  If you close the door and have good logs, you will warm the room. 
      [Another feature of this paneling] is that when you are seated your voice is right against these bevels.  I’ve been a tour guide for many years at the Virginia Museum with its’ marble walls.  I would do three tours down there a day and come home exhausted because of the sound; having wanted everyone to hear.  I limit my tours here to twenty to twenty-five people because I can get them all in the room at the same time.  They can hear me and I don’t have to rely on someone else saying the right thing or not saying enough.  I can drop my voice to almost a whisper.  I don’t have to project it; it projects itself.  So, hearing is something Colonel William Cabell and other people knew about this [paneling].  
      The Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg has the same style of woodwork.  When we were studying the house, I took it upon myself to get to know all of the houses that I could that had this style of woodwork.  The President’s House at the College of William and Mary has it in the front hall and in one room.  There is another house there that Williamsburg has now.  [It is] on its third move so that it can be saved—Colonial Williamsburg didn’t move it three times but in its lifetime it has been moved three times—because it has woodwork like this.  They call it Providence Hall because it was moved from Providence Forge.  It is the most expensive key, to turn the lock, at Colonial Williamsburg, to get in there.  President Regan has stayed there; the Queen stayed there.  The rooms are beautifully finished—it isn’t a large house—but it has this gorgeous woodwork.  In other large houses, like in Colonel William Byrd’s Westwood, there is only one wall of woodwork like this.  As rich as he was, you would think that he could have afforded this.  By the time he got there, all of the big trees, which were required to make this woodwork, were probably gone.  Even that early, everybody was cutting down trees right along the James River.  You couldn’t cut down a big tree and expect to haul it because you didn’t have the means to do that.  That is the reason why Colonel Cabell had picked out this wood on his property.  
0:34:37		Architectural feature: woodwork 
	Now in here we are looking at the three-board cornice with dentils.  Dentils are those little blocks of wood on the crown molding.  I mention [that it is] only three boards because I have been told that if you were trying to duplicate that today it would take from eight to ten boards.  The dentils are little blocks of wood that are not a solid rectangle.  They are carved out in the back just enough to fit on a gum, which is why we call them dentils, as in teeth.  You can put your hand on the dentils as you go up the steps and see exactly how they are made.   
       One of our best stories about restoring the house is that the crown molding was the last piece of woodwork that came over from the barn, which is nearby.  Incidentally, Mr. Will said, “If you can find a piece of land with a barn on it, that would be ideal because you cannot insure pieces of a house.  You can only insure a home.”   
       A barn was over there [in Nelson County], where we could lock up the woodwork.  As the woodwork was needed, Bob Johnson brought it over here.  When he brought the first pieces of woodwork with the dentils, there were dirt-daubers nests, many of them, and missing dentils.  I said, “Roy, we can’t live with this dirt.  It has to come off before it goes up.”   
       My husband looked at me and he said, “Well, you know that this is costing a lot of money.”  (Laughter)  “Do you think you could clean them, devise a way about it?”  I said, “Let me think about it.  Just give me time to think about it.”  Little did I know that all you had to do is tap those dentils lightly with a hammer and they would pop right off.  What I did was devised this plan—.  Do you think this would be interesting?   
       KCH:	Oh yes, very much so. 
0:37:00		Architectural feature: dentils, repair 
	KC:	I can only count to ten because that is how many fingers I have.  I’m not good at numbers, but I knew that I needed four shoeboxes.  Each shoebox was labeled north, south, east, and west, for each room.  We only did one room at a time.  When he knocked them off, each one—north, east, south, and west—went in a different shoebox.  It was in the summer time and we were going to Glouster, by the river, where we had plenty of water.  He cleaned a lot of them down there.  He did use chemical paint removers; had to, to get them clean, but we had plenty of water down there.  He had his own tanks and everything he used.  The dentils were not numbered, but—when they were done cleaning—they went right back in the same shoeboxes.  Here I could take each one out and—if it was clean, had come off very clean—could put it right back where a dentil had been.  Those that had come off and left a part of it on there I put it aside.  I had several like that; I just put them aside—it was like a little puzzle—and I went back and looked on the board to see what fit here.  They are all up there where they ought to be.   
       The other thing to know about the woodwork, especially the cornices, is that they were longer than the wall and went into the wall.  Bob Johnson, when I asked him what was the most difficult thing he said, “Going into a room and deciding which corner was mitered the last and then taking that one off first.”  That was the only way it could be done up here.  His numbers are still evident on some woodwork upstairs that we have never painted.  Every door was marked.  All of the frames around the doors had the same number as the door.  If you’ve ever done any sewing, you can look at that mitered seam [and see] there is only one way it can go back.  It is not a puzzle. 
	Another architectural detail in the house is that, if your eye follows the chair rail around, the chair rail was solid.  It picks up at the fireplace, picks-up and becomes the windowsill.  Some people had very deep windows with window seats in Colonial houses, but this is the way this was built.   
0:40: 04	Architectural feature: windows 
       We do have the only windows in captivity, known, that stay up with no weights.  Virginia was very lacking in iron.  The iron that they had they used to make nails.  They did need some nails.  You can see over here a little paisley teardrop.  If you lifted the window up halfway, you could put that in and make it stay, halfway.  We won’t lift that one right now.  There is at the top of each lower sash—only the lower sash moves—what we call a finger spring.  As it goes up, the top of the sash becomes slightly narrower.  You put it all of the way up and the spring holds it.   
	KCH:	You discovered so many things in the process of deconstructing and then reconstructing. 
	KC:	Now for anyone who wants a picture of that, they can go to Williamsburg because Williamsburg came up and took many pictures of, especially of, what was new or different.  The other thing they came up to see and measure were the holes in the steps going upstairs.  There were two sets of stair carpet, stair carpet holders—where you put the rod through—and since there were two sets, and they were different lengths, Colonial Williamsburg could measure those holes and tell what kind of loom the carpet was made on; to go up the steps.  We can show you a remnant of both the iron and brass holders, which went in those holes. 
	Now, do you want to stop here?   
	KCH:	Okay.  We are going to pause here for a moment and walk into another room. 
(The interview continues as a piece of original paneling is examined in the living room.) 
 
 
 
 
                         Interview 1, track 3 
Track time:  0.11.20 
 
	KC:	Here is a piece of the paneling.  I think it is solid across here.  Most of these were solid.  To get a tree of this width, you have to have to have one that reaches three or four feet around.  See out here.  That is called “sap wood” and most of that had to be cut off.   
	KCH:	Is it not as strong? 
	KC:	Not strong enough.  Then this is the interior, or heart of pine. 
	KCH:	This appears to be about eighteen inches, maybe two feet. 
	KC:	Not quite, maybe eighteen to twenty inches.  (Turning panel over to view the unpainted back.)  But see, it has been put together.  Now most of them are solid and then if they do come apart—like you will see right over here; see this crack—all I have to do is get a hammer, put a cloth on it, hit it, and it will go right back because it is in a routed grove; that means it slides.   
	KCH:	That is one of the reasons that there are not cracks in the paneling, because it moves with the house.   
	KC:	It moves and then it is so thick.  For instance, if you could a saw and cut that—had one side cut out—you could just slip it out. 
0:01:42		Architectural feature: Living room, fireback 
	KCH:	We are standing in the living room looking at the fireplace and the paneling.  The fireplace, the back, is the next thing that Mrs. Cabell is going to explain to us. 
	KC:	The iron fireback was made in a foundry at Buena Vista, Virginia.  We have found that out.  The name of the foundry is right down at the bottom here; I have to get closer to see. 
	KCH:	Is it McCl— 
	KC:	McClure.  McClure and something else; I have to get a lens.  You can see the seraph.—she is flying that way—here are her feel; she is scantily clad.  I joke about her because she really could be in Playboy magazine.  She really doesn’t have very much on her little body.  You can see her wings and you can also see her crown, above her head.  Here are thirteen stars and around the thirteen stars in an arch, like in a rainbow, that says, “Be Liberty Thine.”  “Be Liberty Thine” was, and the seraph was, the symbol of the Revolution.  When Washington made his trip from Mount Vernon to New York to be president, everywhere he passed, in villages, they had banners, “Be Liberty Thine,” with the seraph.  That is why so many vanes—wind vanes up on the house—are shaped with the seraph.  At Christmas time, you see the seraph, the angels.  We also have decoration over here and over there and we have four faces, looking at you.  The whole thing was difficult to do because they didn’t have any way to handle hot iron like we do today.  It was done in a mold on the ground.  The iron was rolled into it and [it] came out like this.  When they brought it over, it took five men to lift that.  It is very thick and very heavy.  It actually is our first radiator.  When you first build your fire here in the afternoon and then you go to sleep, your fire is still there all night.  That piece of iron stays hot and prevents the cold air from coming down the chimney; and radiates a little bit.   
       The “Be Liberty Thine” theme was so well known that Benjamin Franklin used it on his stove, which was invented after this.  His stove came out into the room, which brings the heat more out into the room—he lived in the North, where it was really cold—and then the Be Liberty Thine stove just had a pipe going up to the chimney.   
	Let us go back to these figures.  When they brought this over—when the bricklayer was laying the brick—he said, “Mrs. Cabell, I want that piece to fit exactly,” and so we had it brought over.  It needed to be cleaned with Brillo and steel wool.  I am sitting in here over the joists—there wasn’t any floor in this room—during this cleaning.  I came across these faces and I said, “I wonder what they are?”  I had no idea and no one could tell me.  I thought about it for three months and, after three months, it finally dawned on me; as many things do when you have good ideas implanted in your head.  I had been to Italy—for my very first time abroad—in 1964 to study art and architecture.  I had, we had, a marvelous guide giving us a tour, for a day or so, in Rome through the kindness of Mr. Tennant Bryan, who lives here and owns the newspapers.  We took full advantage of this lady because her father had been one of the first archeologists in Rome to find—and he did discover—the vestal virgins that now line the Coliseum in Rome.  I told her that I was on the Board of Christian Education for the Presbyterian Church U.S.—we published, here in Richmond, all of the Sunday school materials for five different denominations—and could she show me early Christian artifacts.  I said, “I guess we get to go to the catacombs.”  She said, “Oh no Mrs. Cabell, there is very little left there, very little, just the sight.  I will take you to the Vatican museum,” and she did.  We went into this room—I never would have found it on my own—and here were just table, after table, after table, with glass tops.  In the tables—she said, “go and look at each one”—were glasses, pieces of glasses, which were all broken.  I use this little glass dish [to illustrate] but they were all broken up here.  You could clearly see that they were drinking glasses.  She said, “Now look in each one.”  In the bottom of each one, here was this face, this person.  She said, “Mrs. Cabell that is the earliest depiction of the saints that we have.  The glasses were used in the dining rooms where the early Christians met while Christianity was still illegal; and it was illegal until the year 300 to 350 when Constantine made it legal.  In the dining room, the Christians would meet, break bread, eat, drink wine—as in having communion—but if the Roman soldier came by, the glass went down on the table and that removed the picture of the saint.  She told me this too that saints were depicted with a hallo if they were dead, if they were deceased.  The only saint that I know that was depicted before he died was Augustine and his hallo was square because they believed the earth was square.  The ring is the symbol of eternity.   
So all of a sudden, I look at these and I notice these figures, each one of these, has a topknot.  Well that is their hallo.  It is unreal.  That is Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John because we have Bible doors.  Look at the doors.   
       KCH:	Yes.  You do throughout the house. 
       KC:	You have the cross at the top with the New Testament and the Old Testament.  I love to tell this story.  I do to remind people that our ancestors that founded this country believed in their Christian religion, to even bring it out in their architecture.   
	KCH:	Yes. 
	KC:	That tells the story of that. 
	KCH:	You must have been just elated when you made that connection. 
	KC:	I was.  The only other example of this style, with a seraph, is in a house near Lexington.  I have a picture of it and I know the man over there who writes about it.  But, his does not have Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John at the top. 
	KCH:	I am intrigued by the way that the saints, the apostles, are depicted.  It is very primitive. 
	KC:	Extremely.  It was all you could do with iron.  Now in glass they could get the finer detail or with pictures; and we do have frescos, early frescos. 
	Now why don’t we move through the central hall and to the dining room?  Can you do that? 
	KCH:	(Picking up recorder) I certainly can. 
 
 
Interview 1, track 4 
Track time:  0.10.50 
 
0:00:00		Architectural feature: dining room, outside entry 
	KCH:	We are now standing in the dining room.  Mrs. Cabell is going to show us the room and tell us the history. 
	KC:	In moving to the dining room, there is not a lot of new scenery because this too is a cubed room, twenty by twenty, and every room has a fireplace flanked by two closets.  We have seen the two [closet] doors in the living room.  We did take some license with the entrance door here.  This door, this opening, had a curtain hanging in it when we saw the house.  It went right out to a very small room that had been added so that, when Cousin Lucy was here, they could have a gas stove and didn’t have to cook from downstairs.  We did not want that outside entrance, mostly for security reasons.  The paneling went back up in that alcove and there were shelves on each side.  You can see where they had been.  When they wanted the food, they pulled on the bell pull.  We have found where the bell pull rang.  The wire went over one of these panels and down to the ninth working fireplace, which is the warming oven, in the basement.  Now understand all food was cooked in a kitchen, originally, way out in the yard.  You could not get an insurance policy on your house unless the kitchen was a designated distance away from the house—you had a big fireplace and big fires—so the food was brought, by the servants, into the basement.  We rebuilt that warming fireplace, because it had a little place for keeping the bread warm.  Moving back into this [room], we closed the outside door and I did welcome having the space to put shelves to house my too many sets of china.  (Laughter) 
0:02:25		Thomas Jefferson’s visit during the Revolutionary War 
       Shortly after we moved into the house, my wonderful carpenter Bob brought me this set of curtain tiebacks.  You notice that they have no points on the bottom.  You could not make a point in iron until the industrial revolution and that is why early colonial nails are called “cut nails;” you had to cut the nail off.  Then they needed an awl to make a point to make this go in.  Finally, I found in some WPA [Works Progress Administration] records a quote from Thomas Jefferson saying that to dine in a dining room that had a curtained alcove presented an awkward situation because you did not know who was hiding behind that curtain. 
       Now we mention Mr. Jefferson’s name—.  He used to stop by here to visit the younger [Cabells].  He was thirteen years younger than the builder of this house and so he knew the children and he enjoyed their company.  When he was forced away from Monticello—he had to leave after the British were coming and he had been warned by Jacque Jouett that they were in the neighborhood—the only place he knew to go was his summer home, but that was three days away.  He came here, stopped here, and stayed here long enough to use the network of intelligence from this house to get word to all of his council to meet him over in Stanton.  He came here, number one, not because he knew it—though that was helpful—but because he knew that all four brothers, the Cabell brothers, were for the Revolution, fought for the Revolution, and the oldest son in this house had been fighting for many years with Mr. Washington; since the beginning of it since he lived in Williamsburg.  So he felt safe until he came here and sat at the dining room to eat.  He probably sat right there where you are with his back to this curtain.  To have left his home, left his family, left his children—everything that he thought dear of —and to know that there were people in the vicinity coming to kidnap him and he would be shot—everybody was going to be shot; the English were going to kill everybody that had raised arms against them—I can understand how he felt very insecure.   
       Remember also that as he could appreciate the work and the involvement of this family.  Colonel William Cabell was the chairman of the Committee on Safety for Amherst County; Nelson was a new name that wasn’t in existence.  Those people in each county had a network of intelligence with no computers, no radio, no telephone, but they had a way to get the word around and they did.  Mr. Jefferson knew that he could rely on that and so that was a link.  He didn’t stay here very long.  The family never wrote down in their big books that he was here.  I never found it until reading the WPA, through that, and then I finally heard some family members up in Nelson telling that they had heard the story. 
0:06:30		Architectural feature: wall finishes 
	The dining room had this one entrance and it had the door over here, original, that went into the back room that was the ladies withdrawing room.  The ladies would withdraw—have their little children with them, or their big children, or whoever was around—and they could have their light tea and some rum or some whatever they had.  The men had their tobacco in here, and thoroughly enjoyed it.  
	KCH:	It is a lovely room.  Again, we have the paneling that goes only as high as the wallpaper would have extended down.  I do not think that we had the tape recorder going when you were talking about the wallpaper. 
	KC:	At the time the house was built, you could order wallpaper from England that would reach from the very top of the paneling up to where the crown molding is.  You could order it by the yard.  Because it was just sort of geometric—ribbons and lines—it didn’t have to be matched up.  It was just kind of loose-ended. 
	KCH:	The choice of colors in the house. 
	KC:	I have mentioned the fact that the paints have been copied.  You will see that this is called Apollo Room Blue.  The dining room at Williamsburg at the back of the Raleigh Tavern is called the Apollo Room—it was named after a very famous coffee house in England where the Fry-Jefferson map was used—passed from table to table where men could see it, and they told all the wonderful stories about how land was available here—used, that map, to sell land over here.  This is Apollo Room Blue.  You can make Apollo Room Blue a little bluer, you can make it a little grayer, or it can be a little greener.  I have been told that blue is the first real paint color made from earth tones.  Blue and gold were their favorite colors; hence, you have the gold in the entrance hall.  They are still honored colors.  The Society of Colonial Wars, the Society of the Cincinnati, the Ladies Society all have gold tassels and some blue ribbons, et cetera.   
	KCH:	Are we ready to go into the hallway? 
	KC:	I think so. 
	KCH:	May I ask one question before we go? 
       KC:	Yes. 
       KCH:	The cornice above this door—. 
       KC:	The door.  That is the one thing that we added.  The cornices here and in there were added because—and we didn’t mind adding them—we needed them for height.  But, he [Colonel Cabell] also writes in his diary that he could not put the nice carved—I think he calls it “fancy carving”—in this house because, during the Revolution, the agreement we had to bring servants over to do the carving went to the bottom of the ocean; the British weren’t honoring that.  He had to just use—.  So, there is nothing over the doors and they look rather squat.  We did have an excellent restoration architect for the interior to be sure that we followed all of these things. 
       KCH:	He did though—.  Your architect keeps it to scale, but it is still slightly different so that you can tell [that it is new].  Of course, your other openings reflect the original pattern.  It is a nice way to show what was dreamt of but not able to—. 
       KC:	—not able to do.  So now, we will move out in the hall and look at the staircase. 
        
        
        
Interview 1, track 5 
Track time:  0.25.26 
		Architectural feature: Main stairway 
	KC:	As we come into the hall, you will notice the major thing being the stairwell going upstairs.  Each step has a si?ma scroll on its side—si?ma (or sigma) is a Greek word for S and a si?ma is just an S that is on its side—and that was very decorative.  The steps—we were told by Mr. Will the contractor—the steps held the definitive puzzle for measurement.  If the steps were right and the rest of the measurements were right, then everything would fit! (Laughter)  The steps had been painted.  These balustrades had three coats of paint on them that I know of; it may have been four.  They all had to come apart.  We had them delivered over to the house that we were renting nearby that had an outside shed—a shed at the back.  Roy had the steps taken all apart because each balustrade had to be cleaned individually, as well as all of this (step’s tread and riser).  Now, understand that every part had to be numbered.  Here is one part—and it is just that big—and that had the same number as all of this, and this, and the step itself.  We learned after we got it apart that instead of having a solid banister rail going up—as we had been told that it had—it has a pine core under the banister and the top is applied and the sides are applied.  You might call that veneer but that is all one-together, and quite heavy.  It is one piece of a tulip poplar tree.  The tulip poplar grows so tall that in one tree you can find this length.  It goes from here (newel post) all of the way up to what they call the ramp and into the railing on the landing.  All of this being apart, we didn’t have the time—Mr. Cabell didn’t have the time (Laugh)—to get the paint off and get it finished before we moved in.  We were pushing ourselves to get in.  From the time that they dug the hole for the basement until we moved in was eighteen months— 
	KCH:	That is unbelievable. 
	KC:	—because we had the entire inside, all that had been figured out.  Somebody else had to do this, probably an employee of the contractor.   
0:3:00		Architectural feature: house framing and roof  
       They had to figure out how big to make this frame in order to put in this woodwork.  We did not bring the primary timbers here because they had suffered so much damage and—as I will not live in a house that has a roof that will burn—my husband said, “You have to have a slate roof—that’s it—we have to have a slate roof” and  so we had to go up very, very strong.  
       The original roof was cedar shake, and I have some cedar shakes.  It also had a beveled board covering over it.  Each board was finished with a bevel so that it overlapped up on the roof.  We lost that. 
	KCH:	Now, the cedar shake roof that was on Union Hill, was the majority of it still original? 
	KC:	No.  It had been covered with tin right after the Civil War.  That is what saved the house.  So many older homes were burned because they did depend on the fireplaces for their heat.  A spark would go up and land on the cedar shake and, if it was hot or windy, it went up in a hurry because it was so dry.  Alexander Brown put this tin roof on.  Mr. Will said, “Any house can be saved if it has a good roof.”  I know a lot about people that just put tin roofs, metal roofs on.   
 
0:4:43		Architectural feature: central hall stairway 
	We had the steps all apart, the balustrade, but we could get up the steps and we could move in.  But, OSHA said, “Oh no, no, no!  You cannot move in because somebody might come and fall off of the steps.”  So, Roy had the carpenter build, with just bare two-by-fours, enough posts going up.  Then he went to town and bought some minnow nets—this was my husband—came back and draped them—and tied them and tacked them—over the two-by-fours so we could move in the house; get out of the rented space where we had lived for eighteen months.  We were getting a little tired of camping over there.   
       Now that we have understood all of this, the balustrades are made of hard maple.  We are almost sure that they were carved in Williamsburg because the very same balustrades are in the Paxton House—I have a picture of it over here—and maybe one of the Randolph houses at Williamsburg.  They are exactly like this. 
	KCH:	The square piece right in the middle is quite unusual.   
	KC:	Then Tennant and Mary Bryan let us come and look at their house and their balustrades are exactly like this.  Somebody in Williamsburg knew how to carve these, because that is the way they all are.  All of them are original; we did not have to replace any of this. 
	KCH:	I find it just phenomenal that they are all original. 
0:6:32		Architectural feature and furnishings: central hall 
	KC:	The only hanging light fixture in the house was like that one hanging there.  That is a copy of the original.  The original is in a home of a descendent of the family that lived here.  It is now in Pennsylvania.  
       Now, look at all of the hardware.  You see what we call the H-L hinges.  The H part is over here and it is hidden.  Once you lock that lock, which has a thumb-latch that you can’t see, there is no screw that you can take out—or no nail that you can take out—and get that door open.  You cannot do it.  It is locked.  You cannot remove this [door] without taking off all of the woodwork.   
	This map is a map of Virginia that was made when West Virginia was still a part of Virginia.  It is called a Map of Internal Improvements.  That was in something that came from the house.   
       I also have a favorite picture here of the turning basin for the James River canal in Richmond.  Right up here is the Capitol and this little building, here, is where you bought your ticket.  See, here is one of the little boats.  Cousin Lucy used to say that as long as they had the canal going, that was a wonderful way to know, if you had guests coming up the canal, to put your rolls in the oven because they had to sound the horns at the lower bridges, but nevermore.  It is not there. 
       KCH:	Cousin Lucy, whom you refer to, when did she live in this house? 
KC:	She lived in the house until her death and she died in the early 1940s, during the War.  We have her profile in the library and we know about Cousin Lucy.  She did invite my husband to come here when he was a teenager.  Most invitations to Union Hill, to anyone, were in writing and very formal, and for tea.  They enjoyed the central hall.  With both doors open, if there was a breeze—and it would make a breeze—you would get the breeze.  She had her rocking chair here and enjoyed that. 
	KCH:	Do any of the diaries of William, of Colonel Cabell, indicate that they used this as an entertainment area? 
	KC:	No, because he didn’t write about entertainment.  But, he did say—it does say this in Cabells and Their Kin and remember this was written in the 1890s—that this house was a “theater of hospitality.”  That is a very poignant way to put it.  Generally in every central hallway—and there was one here—there was a table right at the foot of the steps that had a marble top on it.  The marble top was there because in case any alcohol was spilled it wouldn’t take off the finish of the table.  Most alcohol in the early days was so strong that it would, so mixing tables had a marble top.   
0:10:29		The Fry and Jefferson map, original location of Union Hill  
	Hanging there is a diminutive copy of the Fry-Jefferson map.  This edition was made around 1750.   
	KCH:	(reading map) 1755. 
	KC:	There were many editions to this map, but you can see Goochland County and Albemarle County.  (Pointing on map)  See, here is Goochland.  Nelson County was not even thought of.  Dover is on this map, near this house.  Right in here is Goochland County today; I know that dip down there. 
	KCH:	On this map, could you locate where the house would have been? 
	KC:	It would have been right here, right in there. 
	KCH:	So it is to the east of Charlottesville. 
	KC:	No.  Well, Charlottesville didn’t exist then like it does today.  In fact, Colonel William Cabell helped move the courthouse from Scottsville into Charlottesville much later, around the 1600s.  This was early on.  When the Cabells got the land up there, this was still Goochland.  Goochland went on both sides of the James River and beyond the mountains in 1727.   
	KCH:	It was a huge county then. 
        KC:	That is the way they had to make them then because you had to have enough people to tax to pay for the courthouse, to pay the coroner, to pay the jury, to keep the records.  To run a courthouse was expensive.  When Albemarle was formed—west of Goochland—it included everything up here that we knew about.  They cut off and made Nelson later.  Also, Amherst and all of these counties over there were part of Goochland to begin with; all of Powhatan et cetera.   
	KC:	As we are looking at the map and talking about land, what has become of the property in Nelson County where this house stood originally? 
	KCH:	A gentleman bought it, after we moved the house, and built his own house on it.  He is now; I think he is deceased because the house has been for sale.  It is a very modern, very nice big house.  Nearly every month, I have read in the newspaper something about a hunting reserve and I keep thinking that it may be near where Union Hill stood.  Maybe, but I don’t know anything else.  We are trying to make sure that at least the slave graves; I am interested in saving all of them.  The markers of the slave graves were out behind the boxwood garden.  I think most everything else has probably been destroyed.   
	KC:	The cemetery, the Union Hill cemetery, it is being maintained by the Cabell Foundation? 
	KCH:	Yes, the Cabell Memorial Foundation; the family society keeps that up.  We have a listing of everyone buried there and that includes Patrick Henry Jr., who was married here.   
0:14:15		Union Hill: significant events and associations  
       The other reasons that we moved this house—not only for its architectural integrity and for what it showed and how it was made—were the events that happened here.  I have told you about Thomas Jefferson coming to save his life.  Patrick Henry himself didn’t come here, but he was a great friend of Colonel Cabell’s, along with George Washington.  They were all within two years of each other.  They met down in Williamsburg and you might say, informally, that they might have been buddies, but not so in those days.  They knew what each other was doing.  They knew what each stood for.  After that, there were eleven marriages between Cabells and Henrys.  Colonel William Cabell, while he was raising the money to build Hampden Sydney, was asked to “entreat with Mr. Patrick Henry” and get him to come on the board at Hampden Sydney, which he did.  Due to the fact that he was always fighting the war, then became governor, and then moved the Capital to Richmond—and not many people know this about Henry—he moved his family up to Richmond.  He had a passel of children and he put them on a farm right across the river out here in what is now Powhatan County.  It was not far from the Huguenot Church.  At the sight of that farm, there is a historic marker marking it.   
       KCH:	And so the children lived outside of the city and he, no doubt, joined them.   
       KC:	You see they had the farm for food.  You didn’t have Ukrops.  You just didn’t have that.  You know what Richmond was; it was on hills and you couldn’t do much with farming.  Then he moved on to the west and had another house out at Red Hill.  His son was married here, Patrick Henry Jr., and only lived nine months after his marriage.  Most of Henry’s children—and he had something like, maybe, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen; more maybe that we don’t know about—but those children suffered with TB, what we know as today, because they got it from their nursing mother. 
       KCH:	And they all had the same nursing mother. 
       KC:	Only three of them survived to adulthood. 
       KCH:	How tragic. 
       KC:	See.  So that is why they had wet-nurses, from their servants. 
0:17:15		Architectural feature: rear entry 
	KC:	Here we are at the back door, where the stagecoach used to stop.  In its heyday, we learned that six hundred souls depended upon mail here; they got their mail and they got their packages.  A lot of visitors came and there was a “necessary” in the back of the boxwood garden, for the gentlemen.  The ladies when they needed privacy and wanted to rest or have a cup of hot tea would come in.  Soon the crowd became a bit much and so they added double doors, right here.  They closed up that door [to the basement] and put paneling up to match, opened up a door right here [to the adjoining room], and, at the same time, built this [partition] below the steps.  Originally, these steps were suspended.  In fact they were counterbalanced up there.  This helped save the staircase and it gave privacy back here.  At the same time, if the doors were open the cold north wind would come in; so we found out.  Our restoration architect told us flat out that the trouble we would have is that this central hall had no fenestration.  The original window was not the Palladian.  We added the Palladian window because the original window was on the same level as all of the windows upstairs.  I am a right tall lady but I had to stand on my tiptoes to get my chin to the windowsill.  He said, “There is no light and there is no way to get heat in the hall.”  That meant that all of these doors had to be closed or the heat was gone with this [outside] door open.  So, they added two double-doors here (under the stair landing at the back of the central hall).  When we took them down, we found the original paneling all intact.  It is a dark gold, darkened with mold and age, but we lightened it because, as dark as it is, we knew that we couldn’t live with the darkness. 
       KCH:	 This would have been a very dark hall with only the one small window.  Did you consider rebuilding the stairway without the bottom support?  Would that have been possible? 
       KC:	Well, we thought that structurally it needed the support.   
       KCH:	That is right; you have the slate roof.   
       KC:	That is right and these steps were counterbalanced.  I am sure that that is why they found out they needed this.   
       	But, the ladies could go right in here and have hot tea or whatever.   
       KCH:	That was very hospitable on the part of the Cabells, but I can see where that could become— 
       KC:	—become a little bit of a problem.   
0:20:20		George Washington’s visit to Union Hill; the James River and Kanawha Canal 
       Now when George Washington visited the house, he came and only sat on the back porch so we know that it was hot, in the summertime.  He wanted a cool drink and the ladies served him a shrub, which is what we would call today a lemonade with a scoop of lemon ice in it—or something from fruit—because it was cold.  There was a little bench out here and he sat on the bench and what they discussed was the subject of the canal.  Together, Mr. Cabell being the secretary of the board of the James River Company—and that was the private company that had built the first leg of the canal—and the canal was supposed to go on up and it was George Washington’s idea.  He knew about the mountains—how you could just get to Ohio by portaging over eleven miles—that included the very high peaks—get on another boat, and wind up on the New River, which flows into the gully and the New River.  That makes a canal that goes straight across West Virginia to the Ohio [River] at Mt. Pleasant, where George Washington fought his first battle and lost it, lost it.  He had traveled and he knew how—.  Canals were very popular in England and they thought that if we could have the canal to get around the falls of Richmond that would help everybody.  So, he came and told Mr. Cabell that he was very sorry, but he could not continue to be president of that company because he was going to be president of the United States!  At his death, he gave his stock in the canal company to Washington and Lee.  That is one reason that it is named Washington and Lee.  Washington and Lee still get a dividend through the C & O Railroad, who bought the rights to the towpath on the canal, to put their railroad on.  Every Washington and Lee student that has ever been here, “Yes Mrs. Cabell, I know that story.”  (Laughter) 
       KCH:	The connections are wonderful, they really are.   
0:23:00		Architectural Feature: Entry doors with applied graining 
       KC:	Now, one more piece about architecture.  You see the graining on these doors, this one (back door) and the front door.  See the graining.  That was done after the death of Colonel Cabell’s wife; she lived into the early-eighteen hundreds.  It just happens that about this time their friend Thomas Jefferson brought to Monticello a man to do graining.  The only original graining that you can find at Monticello is in the dome room upstairs, where not many people can go.  When I went up there, gladly, to look at the graining, I said, “You all should come to my house.  I have a lot of this.”  It has never been touched. 
       KCH:	It is amazing that it has survived, in very good condition. 
       KC:	Good paint.   
       Houses have ghosts.  One ghost here is the ghost of the original lock placement.  When the second generation took over—“Grandpa’s house is so cold.  Everything is so bad and we are going to fix it over.  We are going to get the graining done.  We will switch these doors and hang them better and move the lock over here.”  See? 
       KCH:	Yes, and you can see another ghost of the [lock] box over here.  So, the graining was done during the early 1800s, had it become fashionable at that time? 
       KC:	Thomas Jefferson had it.  Not many other people had it that early because, you see, there was an embargo.  Mr. Jefferson had put an embargo on the bringing in of mahogany, during his presidency.  A lot of his actions didn’t make him real—.  He was not nearly as popular then as he is now.  We didn’t know all of his wise sayings.   
       That about finishes it for here and we will go into the library. 
        
        
        
        
Interview 1, track 6 
Track time:  0.38.40 
	Nelson County setting: land entrance and outbuildings 
	We have just come from the back door and the back porch, or land entrance, is there.  It is a very small back porch—we discussed that in the last segment—but it looked out on a boxwood garden that was quite large.  A big driveway came in at the top of an oval like shape to get the stagecoaches to the back of the house.  The main stagecoach from Lynchburg to Charlottesville stopped here regularly.  This was a depot—like a station—and many people came.  They would enjoy it back there because not only was the boxwood garden there—with the straight alley lining up with the central hall and then the garden on each side—but beyond that was a quadrangle of “buildings of commerce”, or buildings of industry.  Everything that the family needed at any age, at any time—from birth to their coffin—was made there.  There were at least twenty buildings; I was told.  When we got this information, we visited lots of cousins up in Nelson who were then very old.  They had been told this and they remembered it.  They had, of course, the spinning room, or spinning building.  They had the vat room, the dying room—d-y-i-n-g—to dye the material.  They had the shoemaker’s shop.  They made their nails.  They had a carpenter out there.  They had a carriage house; that wound up way over on this side (pointing toward the side of the house).  All around here were people doing—.  I am sure the hen house was near by because you had to protect your chickens or something would come and get them.  To get off of the stagecoach, stop, and see all of that activity, compare it to stopping at an Esso station today.  (Laughter) 
	KCH:	This would be much more entertaining. 
	KC:	You never knew how long you would stay, but you would stay here.  Then most people, if they were coming here, had their trunk.  The trunk would need to be carried up the steps where there was a trunk room at the front of the hall.  It was all sealed off and it looked like a closet.  It was a right big room because everybody brought their trunk. 
	KCH:	Would they also bring a maid to help with their dressing? 
	KC:	They might, they might, but I would say that would be unusual.  They might have someone.  If they came in their own carriage, in their own vehicle, then they had all of those people.  
       A lot of food had to be cooked—out in the kitchen—to feed everybody; take care of everybody.  While I am here at that point, I would like to mention that when Colonel William died he had taken care of his three closest house servants, men, very well.  Instead of leaving them any more money, he gave each of them the black hat that he wore—like he wore—so they could tip their hats and show appreciation and dignity.  In those days, servants were treated very well, very well.  I have to take a second look, listen another time, about any terrible things happening to people, because they were treated well.  They were very expensive.  A servant in the early days cost as much as a Cadillac car today, four to five thousand dollars.  Not many people had a lot of servants and that is why, when they had parties in the dining room, they served cookies built up in a pyramid and everybody served themselves.   
0:4:55		James River Canal records; College of William and Mary 
       But, we are away from the library and so let’s come back to this library, where the book The Cabells and Their Kin was written by Alexander Brown.  This closet over here, which I will always call a closet, was all shelved—we still have the shelves— and a doorknob was non-existent on this side.  The lock was on the doorknob on the inside so that no one could pick the lock.  The way that you got into the door was to get the chief house servant.  He had the key.  You put the key in the lock and open the lock.  You can walk around [the house] and look at how many doors have different holes.  
       All of the existing original records on the building of the canal were right in that closet; one of these [two closets].  —had to be.  All of his surveys, you can still see.  Colonel William Cabell was a surveyor; like most other gentlemen of the time.  They were a surveyor along with being a plantation owner or a manor house owner.  George Washington did surveying.  They all were interested in land because land was the big “blue chip” of the day.  All of the papers, thank goodness, were given to the Swem Library at William and Mary because his surveyor’s license came from there.  William and Mary was the only college and institution that could train people to be surveyors, the math department.  Since his surveyor’s license came from down there, the last Cabell owner—and we thank her every time we think about it—gave the papers to William and Mary.  They are beautifully kept in the rare book collection.  The staff there was more than generous to me, time after time after time.  We went down and studied the original orders: to order the locks for this house; to order the linen to make the draperies; to order the Osnaburg, which was a downgrade kind of heavier cotton for making sheets or clothes for the servants, or clothes for anybody.  The William and Mary librarians will tell you that the Cabell Collection of papers is the richest one that they have.  It was delightful for me every time I went down there.  I got to know [them] and they got to know me.  Having a like for libraries anyway, I had a great time and I took down everything I could. 
0:08:27		Furnishings: Framed images 
	Now, at the fireplace you will see three Saint-Mémin portrait engravings.  The middle one is William Cabell—who gave himself a middle name, William H.—and he lived in this house for a while.  Then he had to marry a second time—he lost his wife at childbirth, which happened a lot—and he came back to Richmond, married Agnes Gamble of Gamble’s Hill, and lived on Gamble’s Hill.  The house is still there.  It is a brick house.  He became governor and then he became the head of the Appellate Court—my husband called it that, but it was called something else then.  It was the highest court in the state of Virginia.      
	The one on this side is Joseph Carrington.  He is the one who, as a friend of Mr. Jefferson’s in the legislature, raised all the money for Mr. Jefferson to build UVA, the University.  As we have slightly mentioned before, Mr. Jefferson was not popular among the rank-and-file people, after he was president.  It was a difficult time.  I think that anybody would have found it difficult.  Jefferson writes, in his own words, that he just plain did not enjoy public service.  He did not want to go, to peek into what everybody, the whole public, wanted.  That is why he enjoyed his little mountain so—he called it his “little mountain”—and enjoyed his family and everything there.  Not only did Joseph Carrington raise the money for that, but he raised the money for the canal too.   
       KCH:	He must have been traveling frequently.  Since that was probably the only way to raise money, to have contact with people. 
       KC:	He was.  You are right. 
       Then the one on the left is the younger brother of the builder of this house.  His name is Nicholas.  He stuck around and stayed in Nelson County.  His house existed and then all of a sudden it burned, during my lifetime.   
       KCH:	Now William H. Cabell— 
       KC:	The one in the middle. 
       KCH:	Yes.  —that lived on Gamble’s Hill, was he the owner of this house at the time he lived here? 
       KC:	No, no.   
       KCH:	He was not a descendent. 
       KC:	He was a descendent.  I said that in his very early twenties, when he first married, he lived here because he had married a Cabell cousin.  His wife died at childbirth.  He was despondent over it, as every man was, and he left the country for a while.  When he came back, he settled in Richmond.   
       Now Colonel William Gamble, Mr. Gamble played a terrific part in saving Boston during the Revolution because he owned a lot of land over in the valley of Virginia and raised wheat.  The Bostonians were under siege from the sea by the British and they couldn’t get their flour that way, wheat flour.  So the flour was moved by wagon overland into the back door of Boston to feed them.  These men saw that the Bostonians were kept up.  There were a lot of small acts during the Revolution that proved that our ancestors were not only brave but that they had pledged their honor, their trust, and their life to each other.   
       So, we have these three Cabells.  Unfortunately, there is no picture of the Cabell who built this house.  There is an early picture available—I have a copy of it—of the Dr. Cabell.  He had served in the Navy and that is what made him interested in Virginia.  His ship had put in to Yorktown.  He knew Yorktown.  Then he and his cousin William Mayo decided to come across, come up the James River together.  The father of the man who built this house had a 1,200 acre land patent on Lickin Hole Creek; fifteen or eighteen miles from here on the James River.  William Mayo lived across the river.  That William Mayo had a brother that came to Richmond.  The name Mayo Bridge comes from that family.  There is nothing left of William Cabell’s first house up on the creek.  Nothing is there and it has all become so overgrown.   Nothing is there but the record of it is there.  We have it on the map and we know how many acres it was. 
       KCH:	Who owns that property now? 
       KC:	I know who owned part of it at one time but it has been sold.  You know land in Goochland is just the highest chip around.  That land was sold a lot, so I don’t know. 
       There is a road up there called the Chapel Road that got its name because he had to get permission from Williamsburg to build a road.  He had to get permission to build a road from his house to the chapel.  Again, we stress their devotion to their Christian religion.  They had to be at chapel to receive the sacraments and that was what was important to them, very important.  Not only to be married and to wed, but to have communion, or to die.  To be married and wed is the same thing.  (Laugh)  Chapel Road is still up there and it goes exactly where we would expect it to go.  I know where the chapel was and there is nothing there anymore.  It later became a Baptist Church. 
       KCH:	The church of the Cabells, has it always been Presbyterian?  You’ve mentioned Presbyterian before— 
       KC:	No, no, no, no. 
       KCH:	—or were they Anglican? 
       KC:	They were always Episcopalians, especially from this house and from my husband’s family, too.  There was later a house that was built on this land, near where this house was.  But, my father-in-law was born up there in the house that his father had built, and his grandfather.  At one time they were all very near where this house was.  They were Episcopalians but my father-in-law married a strong Presbyterian lady in town, in Richmond.  Our side of the family has been Presbyterian.   
       They were interested in helping found Hampden Sydney, not for religion particularly, but for the convenience of having a college fairly near the neighborhood, for everybody up there.  Traveling down to Williamsburg, where there were still Indians shooting arrows at white people, was just too dangerous a trip.  It was just too dangerous to send a young person.  So, Hampden Sydney was formed.  In fact, the Hampden presbytery met at Colleton, the former house.  That started before the revolution.  This house was built between 1774 and 1777.  How he built the house, raised money for Hampden Sydney, fed and supplied the Revolution, the Amherst militia—he was in charge of that—.  I don’t see how they did all of that.  I guess they would wonder why we don’t get some more done. 
       KCH:	(Laugh) I think they might! 
        
0:17:24		Style Weekly article 
       KC:	Now on this wall, you see a profile of Cousin Lucy, over here, and then a picture of my husband.  I’ll give you a copy of that—that is Style magazine. 
       KCH:	Oh, the Home section of Style. 
       KC:	Then, this is the four Cabell brothers and this is my father-in-law.  Here is Uncle Pat, who was the oldest, and here is Uncle Pat. 
       KCH:	The silhouettes are wonderful. 
       KC:	By 1896, Uncle Pat had come to Richmond to be a lawyer.  Out in the hall—I didn’t point it out to you—but he had bought a ram from a man named Lewis Ginter and we have the payment for the ram.  —the bill for it and the genealogy for the ram, because he was registered, and what the ram cost.  At that time, the ram could be put on the train and sent up to Nelson.  You needed a ram to be with your sheep.  Sheep provided not only wool for clothes but food and they also mowed the grass.  	 
       KCH:	A very practical animal to have. 
       KC:	The best God ever made because he had a lawn mower on the front end and a fertilizer machine on the rear.  (Laughter) 
       KCH:	That is an observation that I have never heard. 
       KC:	(Pointing to framed diploma)  We have been treated very nicely by William and Mary.  That is the first law diploma ever issued in the United States, a copy of it.  It was the diploma given to William H. Cabell.  William and Mary asked my husband to come down and receive it because the Cabell Foundation had been very thoughtful to continue down there.   
       KCH:	When you say William H. Cabell— 
       KC:	He went to Hampden Sydney early and then went to William and Mary to get the rest of his education.   
       KCH:	Okay, because Colonel William Cabell attended William and Mary, but he was a surveyor. 
       KC:	He went down there to get his surveyor’s license.  He would have been a graduate student, I guess, because he was older.  He had finished his real training in the Navy, you see.  Oh, you mean the builder of this house. 
       KCH:	Yes. 
       KC:	It was his father who was in the Navy.  I don’t know.  I guess he went to school down there.  I’ve never looked—.  I’ll have to look up in The Cabells and Their Kin about that.  
       KCH:	I’m trying to get the generations [straight].  When we have names that repeat themselves it is— 
       KC:	—very difficult. 
       Now in this library, anything painted is something that we added.  You see how large my books are on art and everything, but they had small books like the smallest book up on the fifth bookshelf.  See how small they are up there.  Books were light.  They were small.  They stood in freestanding bookcases so that any time they bought a book they could have another bookcase made.  Now I am hemmed in with these and I have all of the books I can possibly manage.  I need to bring more from upstairs down here.  I have a working library.  That is why you see all these things sitting around, especially this pile over here.  People come to me from all around, from all over the United States, for certain historic information.  
0:21:38		Dahlgren’s Raid 
        I’m quoted in this national magazine to document the Dahlgren Raid during the Civil War, which came right through here.  Now this house wasn’t here then, but it came through here.  I have followed-up research about Dahlgren’s Raid.  He swept—all of his five hundred men on a horse—they tried to burn houses.  They burned all of the crops.   
       Another famous story is the Cabell connection with the builder of Sabot Hill, number one, Mr. and Mrs. Seddon.  I won’t try to tell the full story here; it takes too long and that is the Civil War.  She knew the parent’s of Mr. Dahlgren because she had been to school in Philadelphia.  She was known as the heroine of Richmond because she detained Mr. Dahlgren with her charm and invited him to come into her house, et cetera.  That is another interesting story that we ought to cover at another time.   
       Here is one item that did belong to Dr. Cabell and we are very lucky to have it.  I guess it came from Englewood.   Here you can hold this. 
       KCH:	It appears to be a mortar. 
       KC:	It is.  It is what he mixed his medicines in.  This is a burl of walnut.  Heavy. 
       KCH:	Heavy is right.  It is about—what do you think—eight inches high and eight inches across? 
       KC:	Double that. 
       KCH:	That is a treasure. 
       KC:	We don’t have many things that belonged to him, but we do have that.  As I said, in their library he had books in Latin, Greek, French, and English.  It was a magnificent library and something unfortunate happened to all of the books.  There were a few like this left.  We do have a few of these that came via Englewood—my husband’s father’s house— that date way back.  I don’t know exactly what happened to the books.   
       It was in the library here that visitors were allowed to come because they were right near the stagecoach door.  It was here that he paid off men and families who had given beeves, b-e-e-v-e-s as in beef, and sent them to the troops to feed them during the Revolution.  All those records are available. 
       KCH:	So he conducted his business affairs from this room, in addition to the stagecoach— 
       KC:	Yes, because you rarely let visitors go into the, shall we say, important houses, or important parts of the house, or formal parts of the house, because your family was eating or—.  You see. 
       Maybe we should go to the anteroom. 
25:45		Passageway 
	KC:	(walking from the library to the passageway) Now remember, when you go through this door, you go out of the old house.   
       We added this ten-foot passageway to get out to the porch.  Right behind you is [an image of] a new building at Hampden Sydney.  They named this Cabell Hall in honor of William Cabell, who kept these records of his lottery to raise the money for Hampden Sydney.  Now a lottery was the only way they really had to raise money.  See they are all numbered.  Cabells have always been excellent record-keepers. 
	Here is the simple story, in pictures, of what the house looked like inside while taking it down.  We also have these on slides.  Then over here on the shadow box board, the most impressive thing is the number 1774.  [It is] carved right there with the four notches.  That indentured servant had served his four years.  At the end of four years, he got fifty acres, free, in the new land, plus a new suit of clothes, and new shoes made for him.  He could go off and do his own thing, if he wanted to.  Most people wanted to stay fairly close to the family that had protected them.   
       Here is a dentil that got broke.  See the piece.  See what I told you about having to fit them on.  That is original blue paint.  Here are two sets of stair hardware.  The iron set is out here, bigger, the brass set is here, and you see that the brass broke.  The rod for holding the carpet went through that.  Then we have cut nails.  We have screws, finally, but the screws don’t have a fine point on them.  All of this iron hardware was made right here: these latches, here is a nail core, here is the end of a very fine saw with the tiny sawing edge.  They are very sharp. 
	KCH:	What is this piece? 
	KC:	This piece was outside, but it is where you could loop the reins of your horse.  It was out there where everybody came in, the door through the dining room.  You could tie your horse up real quick, if nobody was there to meet you.  See how heavy they made—. 
	KCH:	Yes.  This thing has a point at one end so it could be—. 
	KC:	That was made by hand, but you could do that that big.   
       Now here is a piece of molding for the baseboard.  That shows you what we had to improve and take off the paint.  Because the paint had lead in it, we had to take off all of the paint.  Our only problem was that we could not find anyone in Goochland County that wanted to be hired, to do anything that resembled work.  Taking off paint is work.  Husband had to keep up his business—he went to Singapore three times while we were doing this—and so he moved me out here to be here every day.  I took off a lot of paint, most of it with a heat gun.  We didn’t use very much chemical.   
       KCH:	I admire your perseverance.   
       KC:	Here is one original baluster, like the balusters on the front porch.  This is the way they were made.  This point on the top, see it went at the bottom and then this [other end] went up where the railing is.  We found this [baluster] and a lot of this carving, which are very different dentils.  This one is called flame and candle, or candle and flame, and this was carved as porch trim.  After the Revolution, William and his brother, Joseph, brought up from Yorktown all the Hessians, which had just been paid to fight against us by the British.  They didn’t want to go back to Europe.  The Cabells knew that German Hessian type folk could make things so well.  They needed water wheels.  They needed machinery.  But first, they needed to get their houses fixed.  William had them do the trim for the porches.  They had had porches before but no trim.  Joseph had them carve all of the woodwork for his house, which is now the country club of Amherst County.   
       KCH:	And it is [named]— 
       KC:	—called Winton. 
       KCH:	—and it is the main house at the country club. 
       KC:	There is a Henry buried there, Mrs. Patrick Henry, I think.   
       Because the Yankees came through and lived in this house during the Civil War, a servant probably took this off, certainly these from the front porch.  Because of the coolness when they were here, they had to have a fire.  They didn’t want to go out and cut wood and so they just took down parts of the house.  These were all under the dirt down in the cellar.   
       KCH:	Oh, so it definitely was taken off to protect it. 
       KC:	Taken off and buried down there.  This and this are both walnut.  This is a piece that—.  It did get yellow and darker with age and then the three colors we had to deal with.  I think that is it. 
       KCH:	The crest that is on this lock box— 
       KC:	Oh!  It is the British royal crest, the unicorn.  This dates back before the Revolution.  All of the insides of this lock are beautiful brass.  This is something that you could take off and move from room to room.  If you needed a lock, you just screwed it on, like locks do today, just screw on.  You could take that off and move it from one house to another. 
       KCH:	The construction of this [passageway]. 
       KC:	Our restoration architect urged us, when we added this passageway, to put the joists back up there that we could find, that were marked, and that were good.  You can see—the light is on this one right here—there are three straight notches.  Then, here is number four.  All of the joists are put together with mortise and tenon, as you can see right here.  Here is your tenon, called a treenail. 
       KCH:	Trenale? 
       KC:	Treenail, tree nail.  It is Yankee talk.  I have never heard of treenail down here, but they still use it.  We could have rolled this house down a hill and it would not have come apart, because it was put together so well.  These joists were so heavy.   
       Now this light shines right on the five, upside down, there.  That is a summer beam.  See that is a main joist, a summer beam. 
       KCH:	I am so glad that you saved those pieces and made them visible. 
       KC:	Then, we put four boards up there.  They are not in order.  Wherever you see them cut out—you can see it over here—that is how they made the floor smooth.  They put it on the joist and, if it didn’t go down, they just notched out the floorboard and made it go down. 
       KCH:	It is often notched out as much as three-quarters of an inch. 
       KC:	Yes.  They are not up there in any order.  It is just what we had to get up there quickly. 
       KCH:	It is nice that one can see the width of the joist in the floorboard. 
       KC:	The joist—we have the end of one right here—this one is marked twenty-nine.  That was—.  Every room was marked separately so this was in one room.  That is just very heavy.   
       This is a part of the original crown molding outside.  That is light because it is ash wood.  Ash is light.  When you are building—.  They had the sense to go up with lighter woods.  This was the template used by my carpenter to get the crown molding repaired, where it had to be repaired, and up there the way it was.   
       Then from Grandfather’s house in Nelson, we found all of these cards for whiskey from Lynchburg. (Laughter)  They went to Lynchburg.  From my father-in-law’s house, where these came from, were also these pin-up girls from UVA.   
       KCH:	Oh, they are fun.  Now, your father-in-law wrote extensively.  Wasn’t he the Commissioner of Revenue? 
       KC:	How smart you are.  He was the first Commissioner of Revenue to write the regulations, in 1914.  He had to start doing that in 1912.  He was appointed by President Taft and he wrote them against his will.  Right after he had to write it—did it the best that he could—he left Washington and came back to Richmond.   
       I finally had nerve enough one day to say, “Daddy Cabell, why were you opposed to Internal Revenue?”   
       He said, “Because, the Democrats are taxing a man’s ability to earn money rather than his ability to spend it.”  How many executives do you know today that reach a certain level and say, “I might as well give it up.  Everything I make is going to taxes.”  That is the way it is. 
       KCH:	The other thing that I am aware of is that he spoke out against prohibition. 
       KC:	All over the country he did, because he said it was a law that could not be enforced.   
       KCH:	I think that history certainly proved him right on that.   
       KC:	Right.  It could not be enforced.  He got to know a lot of very distinguished people across the country.  We won’t name them but we do know about them.  They remained his very loyal clients.  He had a very interesting career.  He would serve people, in Richmond, of any stature.  He would represent them and his costs were always very low.  So were my husbands, or so I’ve heard.  Law was their life.  We found that English people brought the law and they brought their religion—Christianity in general—and the early churches.   
       I think that about does our lecture.   
       KCH:	Let us go in the other room and regroup a little.  If you are willing, I may have a few follow-up questions. 
38:40 
End of First Interview 
?? 
 
?? 
 
?? 
 
?? 
 
		  
 
 
Kathleen Buchanan Cabell		  
 
 
37