Williamsburg, VA: A Promised Trip from 1982 (Part Two)

Together in Saltville, Pauline (top row, 2nd from the left, known much
later to us as Granny) and her little sister Bea (bottem left), along
with the rest of the ladies in their family.  Below is Bea's note to Pauline.

 Williamsburg, Virginia, a visit in pictures to Virginia's Colonial Capital.

The following pictures are from a fold-out packet of souvenir pictures.  To see the story behind the packet, and the first set of pictures, check out part one of this post: Williamsburg, VA: A Promised Trip from 1982 (Part One).  The link for Part One can be found at the end of this post.  .

Williamsburg, VA: A Promised Trip from 1982 (Part One).
And for more information on visiting Williamsburg, check out VisitWilliamsburg.com.

Williamsburg, VA: A Promised Trip from 1982 (Part One)

"Granny", with her daughters, visiting the Empire State
Building in 1965.  

"This is where we'll go if you come back..."

It was 1982, and my wife's grandmother, Pauline, a woman everyone called Granny, received a folded packet of postcards in the mail.  She lived here in Lake Charles, Louisiana.  The packet was from her sister, Bea, who lived in Saltville, Virginia.  Saltville was the family home, where Granny had been raised, before she had followed her husband to a job in the sweltering heat of the Louisiana coastal plain with one son in tow in the 1930's.  The transplanted couple added two daughters to the family, the youngest of which became my mother-in-law.  By 1982, Granny had lost her husband to emphysema, her daughters were both married, and she lived with her son, who never left home.  Granny never would move back to Saltville, choosing instead to live out her years in the home she had built with her husband.  She would, on occasion, still visit her ancestral home in the mountains.  Obviously looking forward to a visit later in the year, her sister slipped the packet in the mail.

I found the packet just a few days ago, stuffed inside a high-backed secretary desk in the home of Granny's oldest daughter.  Bea intended to take her sister's family to Williamsburg, Virginia.  Did Granny and Bea ever get to Williamsburg?  I do not know.  I'd never heard talk of such a trip, nor have I ever found pictures to suggest it happened.  Both sisters are no longer here to answer such questions.  Neither are Granny's children.  But what we do have is the packet, which gives us a great look at what they might have seen if they ever made the five hour, 350 mile trip from Saltville to Williamsburg.  The packet is all-in-one, connected and folded to the size of one postcard.  Unfolding it reveals the trip that may or may not have happened.

Watch for part two of this post for the rest of the postcards in this collection.
And for more information on visiting Williamsburg, check out VisitWilliamsburg.com.

My View of Rosedown Plantation (Part Three)

Rosedown Plantation, St. Francisville, Louisiana.

Today's post is the final look at the historic garden plantation, Rosedown.  After our introduction in part one, and our interior tour of the house in part two, we'll now take a final walk around the grounds.  And as promised, I'll introduce you to a friend we met along the way.

Just off the southwestern corner of the house, you'll find the formal gardens.  Admittedly, during our visit, there were not many flowers in bloom.  It was early September, and most of them were still in heat-check.  However, we did see plenty of marigolds, ageratum, phlox (white and pink), as well as flowering crepe myrtles and butterfly bushes.

But don't worry, in this view on the left, from the formal gardens, you can see that even the pond looks picturesque in the late morning sun.  

As I mentioned in the first post on Rosedown, Martha Turnbull was inspired by her trip to Europe in the 1850's to build these gardens, which eventually expanded to 28 acres of lush, carefully planned walks and gardens.  The old brick wall in this picture is what is left of the original conservatory, where many of the plants would have been carefully raised.

According the Louisiana State Park web site, these were some of the largest private gardens in the United States in the 19th century.

Midway down the grand Oak alley that approaches the house, you will see this view of the North Garden's fountain and summerhouse on the left.  There is a corresponding summerhouse in the South Garden.  The playful sounds of the fountain were a special addition to the stillness of the gardens.  

It would be very easy to lose yourself in the solitude and peace that shrouds these grounds like the Spanish moss on the oaks above.

  As soon as we arrived in the parking lot, this tough-looking fella crawled out from under a car and introduced himself.  He was eager to show us around.  After we paid the entrance fee (as of this date, the entrance fee is $10 a person) he accompanied us as we began our walk through the paths of the North Garden.  He was not in the least interested in the spider-webs that spanned the pathways, nor the menacing banana spiders that brooded in the center of them.  He was short enough to pass under them without giving them the least thought.

However, he was happy to have company, rubbing himself against my ankles as I stopped to take a few snapshots.  He even made sure to get my attention so that he would make it into my blog.  I only noticed he was gone when I heard him crashing through the bushes after a very noisy and frightened pigeon.

The sun-dappled privet hedges and paths provide plenty of opportunity for visitors to take in this breath-taking plantation.  For those of you who are gardening enthusiasts, the bookstore at Rosedown sells copies of Martha Turnbull's extensive gardening journals, which detail the intricacies of the preparation and maintenance processes necessary to create and sustain such impressive landscaping.

A link is provided at the end of this post if you are interested in the diary.

  

This map, which is provided at the beginning of the tour, gives you an idea of the scope of the Rosedown gardens.  During the 1950's restoration, great care was taken to use the most accurate varieties of plants they could find.  Using Martha's diary, they were able to recreate her antebellum world.  

Many thanks go out to the staff of Rosedown Plantation for their friendliness and hard work.  It made for an enjoyable stroll beneath spreading oak trees, cypress trees, and even the oldest pine tree in the state.  We won't soon forget this world that is well off the beaten path of all that is ordinary.

And one last bit of advice for visitors:  There is no restaurant on the grounds.  However, just down the road in St. Francisville, you'll see Sonny's Pizza, a local joint with some of the best pizza I've had in a long time.  Don't hesitate to check them out.

Like the photograph of the approach to Rosedown at the top of this post?  It is available as a coffee mug at the following link.

Rosedown Plantation Coffee Cup

My View of Rosedown Plantation (Part Two)

Rosedown Plantation, St. Francisville, Louisiana.

Having taken a tour of the grounds around Rosedown Plantation in our last post, as promised, I'll give you a tour of the interior of the home on this trip.

The foyer of the house grabs your attention as soon as you step in out of the sunlight.  This open entryway is colorfully decorated with a wall paper that, while not original to the house, is an exact copy of the original wall-covering, manufactured by the original European firm that first supplied the design over one hundred and fifty years ago.

The home remained in the hands of the original family from the time it was built, in the 1830's, until the mid 1950's.  At that time, Catherine Underwood, a Texan, purchased the estate and spent $10 million on a ten-year restoration.  This included researching and commissioning the recreation of the wall décor.

Our tour was conducted by a very friendly guide, Sasha, who was full of wonderful information on the restoration as well as the history of the home.  A few rules were stressed, including the requirement that we not use a flash with our camera, and we were asked not to touch anything in the home.  It was easy to see why.  All of the furniture was original, and you could tell.  Not that it looked old and used.  Far from it.  It was all in excellent and remarkable condition, considering the humidity of Louisiana.  (Now the home is air-conditioned, which was a nice treat on that hot summer day.)   But you could simply sense that these marvelous pieces were not merely imitation tables and chairs and divans.  The Turnbulls, the family that built Rosedown, were extremely wealthy, and they furnished their home accordingly.

Being wealthy in the America South of the early 19th century, they were slave-owners.  A large plantation, Rosedown included about 450 slaves at one time.  According to the guide, this stairway was built for the Turnbulls with the skilled carpentry of their slaves.  As she pointed out, after over one-hundred and fifty years, they are still solid, and do not even creak.  A testament to the slaves' skill.

However, these were not the only stairs in the house.

In the back of the house, in the butler's pantry, between the dining room and Mrs. Turnbull's office, you can see these stairs that were used by the house servants.  When the house was restored, these stairs were left as they were found, in order to preserve their condition for display.  As you can see, the edge of the wooden steps are heavily worn down from a century of use.

This view is from the second floor, as it goes down into the butler's pantry.  At the top of these stairs is the attic, which we were not allowed to see.  (What a disappointment!)  However, it was the only part of the house we were not allowed to see.  As house tours go, it was a very thorough tour with near-total access.  Something that is not always the case in historic homes.

The dining room was still flooded with morning light, despite the fact that it was after 11 AM.  Here in the dining room, there was one main meal of the day, eaten around two in the afternoon.  According to our guide, the fan above the table was operated by a young slave who sat on a seat against the wall.  Though the guide did not mention it, I wondered if they hired servants to do this after 1865.  I'm just glad the fan above our own table is electric.

Just outside the front of the house, off to one side, was a small office built for the family's doctor.  Martha Turnbull had three children; Sarah, who would eventually raise 10 children at Rosedown, and two boys, one of which died of yellow fever at the age of seven.  Hired to care for the children, the doctor remained to care for not only the family but the entire slave population.  It was a rarity for a plantation to have a doctor on site for the slaves.

The plantation was ravaged by Northern troops during the war, and Sarah's family (she married James Bowman from the nearby Oakley Plantation) kept the plantation in operation with the aid of 250 sharecroppers.

Upstairs in the master bedroom, there was this little collection of sundries.  The wedding dress off to the left was a reproduction of Sarah's original dress.  Along the way I also saw swords, wicker bustle supports, shotguns, and lots of personal papers.

The personal papers were well preserved from the family, who never seemed to throw out any papers.  Receipts, notes, lists, sheet music, and schoolwork; it was all there for the preservationists to discover and examine.  Many of them have been laid out so that visitors can catch a glimpse of the Turnbulls' daily lives.

The master bedroom was not particularly large.  However, considering that Sarah and James had ten children, it was a fairly large (and busy!) room in comparison to the three smaller rooms that were used for the children.

Sarah lived until 1914.  Her four unmarried daughters, Corrie, Isabel, Sarah and Nina, became the sole inhabitants of Rosedown.  When Nina, the last daughter, died in 1955, they had managed to keep Rosedown debt-free, as well as held onto 3,000 acres of land, 28 acres of gardens, the house and its furnishings.  They were remarkable women, considering everything the plantation had seen, including the Civil War and the Great Depression.

The nursery looked very cozy.  It must have been, with all of those kids!  I was amused to see a fireplace in the nursery.  We are so safety conscious today, the Turnbulls might have been brought up on reckless endangerment charges for having a fireplace in the nursery.  However, as the guide pointed out, how else would they have heated the room?  And as my wife pointed out, there was probably a nursemaid on duty to keep an eye on them.  Or maybe at that time, kids were just so used to seeing fires that they weren't tempted to play with them.  Yeah, sure.

As the tour came to an end, we ended up in the library.  This beautiful room was graced with three bookshelves, one of  which you can see in the picture here.  They were not built on site, but were ordered from abroad.  They were supposed to be made with the same dimensions, but when they arrived, it was discovered that they were not of equal size.  Instead of having them sent back and others made, it was decided to offset the chimney.  This was not such a difficult decision when slaves were available to do such labor-intensive work.  Still, it seems a bit extreme.  It is sort of comforting, however, to realize that even the extremely wealthy have to deal with things like this.

Sasha did a great job of showing off the house and its history.  We were the only ones on the tour, so it was an unhurried, quiet tour.  The guide even treated us to her own rendition of Beethoven's Für Elise on the Turnbull's pre-Civil War piano.  It still sounded amazing.  Again, a difficult feat in the Louisiana humidity.  And yes, I too saw the irony in her playing a piano on which stood a card that clearly read please do not touch.

So be sure to take the time to tour the inside of Rosedown while you're visiting the grounds.  There is much more to see than what I've included here.

Next post I'll show a bit more of the formal gardens as well as introduce you to a friend I met while we were there.

Like the photograph of the approach to Rosedown at the top of this post?  It is available as a coffee mug at the following link.

Rosedown Plantation Coffee Cup

My View of Rosedown Plantation (Part One)

Rosedown Plantation, St. Francisville, Louisiana.

The sun was shining strong the morning we drove north on US Highway 61.  Just about twenty minutes north of Baton Rouge, in the quiet, historic town of St. Francisville, we arrived at our destination: Rosedown Plantation.  It was a splendid September morning, perfect for taking in the natural beauty of this one-hundred-and-eighty-year-old estate.  After passing through the entrance, we paid the ten dollar entry fee (per person) and were directed to enter the grounds through a small path that led through tall azalea bushes and even taller cypress trees.  Spanish moss draped the canopy above.  Right away, we discovered that Spanish moss was not the only material hanging about.

Spread across the path were many large webs with these rather alarming looking banana spiders sitting directly in the center of them.  These are actually a fairly common site down here in Louisiana, as my kids can tell you from growing up in the country.  Run around playing hide and seek in the myrtle bushes and you're going to run into this yellow fellow eventually.  My wife can still remember her childhood experience of walking into a web and seeing the spider start towards her.  Her uncle pulled her out of the web in time to prevent her from being bitten but not soon enough to erase the nightmares.  Though everyone here calls them banana spiders, they are actually golden silk orb-weavers.  Their webs are spectacular works of art, and though they will bite and their venom is similar to a black-widow bite, it is far less powerful.  But I didn't want to test that theory.  However, once we were on the paths of the North Garden, there was no way to get out except under and around all the webs.  So we crouched, and walked very slowly until we made it out into the open approach to the house.

There were no identifying marks that I could find on
these statues, so this could either be one that
represented a season or any of the mythological characters.

As we stepped into the open, we were treated to an iconic view of the plantation house down a lengthy avenue of oak trees.  On an ancient brick base, I found a faded plaque which read:

STATUES: THE CARRARA MARBLE STATUES WERE PURCHASED IN ITALY IN 1851 WHEN MARTHA AND DANIEL TURNBULL AND THEIR DAUGHTER, SARAH, TOURED EUROPE.  THOSE ALONG THE AVENUE ARE NAMED FOR MYTHOLOGICAL CHARACTERS AND THE SEASONS.  THE FOUR FACING ROSEDOWN HOUSE REPRESENT THE CONTNENTS (sic).

There was no statue on this base.  There were several bases which seemed to be missing their statues.  However, there were still several of the statues in attendance along the avenue, and the four figures representing the continents still face the house.  I wanted to linger along the avenue, however, the house tour was about to begin, as it was 10:55 and the tours begin every hour on the hour.  So we walked through the shade of the oaks and approached the front porch.

The front approach to the house, as seen from its
balcony.  Two of the Carrara marble statures that
represent the continents can be seen on the left.

The stately feel of that approach is truly spectacular.  These formal gardens were designed and built over a twenty year period under the direction of Martha Turnbull after that grand tour of Europe.  She is said to have been influenced heavily by the formal gardens she saw there.  I can believe it.  Having recently been to Versailles and the Tuileries gardens, I can say that Rosedown, while not as large as those sites, can certainly stand in their company without shame.  Rosedown's gardens were in fact some of the only formal gardens found in the United States in the 19th century.

Rosedown is far too extensive and fascinating to cover it in one blog, so I'll stop here for now.  Next post we'll look at the interior of the house.  A third post will cover the formal gardens.

The avenue of oaks leads to this idyllic walkway, which leads to the front porch.  It was easy to imagine
riding up the avenue in a carriage.  Despite the heat of the day, it was pleasant under the shade of the oaks.

This lady was surrounded by Spanish
moss, azaleas, and banana spiders.

Like the photograph of the approach to Rosedown at the top of this post?  It is available as a coffee mug at the following link.

Rosedown Plantation Coffee Cup

An Early View of New Orleans in 2014

If you are like me, you're always looking for a unique calendar.  It always seems like the same calendars show up on the shelves over and over again: wolves, Marilyn Monroe, rainbows.  They even use many of the same pictures.  Even when my wife and I look for calendars of our favorite cities, we usually just see the same tired old shots.

So I've taken matters into my own hands, and my own camera.  Last year I designed several Paris calendars.  Sold on the website Zazzle, I was happy to provide an alternative for many people throughout the US and Canada who were shopping for a calendar that didn't just have the usual photographs of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe.  In addition to new Paris calendars for 2014, this year I am including calendars for New Orleans.  If you've been following Room With No View, you know I've been photographing that marvelous city quite extensively.

The first two calendars for New Orleans are now available.  Use the links below to order one (or both) of them after checking out a few of the photographs you'll find in the collections.

French Quarter Balconies Calendars by Jason Reeser

New Orleans' French Quarter Calendar by Jason Reeser