A modest establishment in very truth, but not contemptible from the Old Virginia standpoint. Small as it was, we did not have it to ourselves until after Christmas. I esteemed this a fortunate circumstance from the first, considering how much I had to learn of housekeeping and parish work. Subsequently, I knew it for one of the signal blessings of a life that has been affluent in goodness and mercy.
For the occupants of the Parsonage, pending the completion of a house of their own in building at the other end of the village, were Mr. and Mrs. Wirt Henry, a young married couple with one child. They had rented the cottage for the year ending January 1st, and kindly consented to receive us as boarders until the term had expired.
From the moment that Wirt Henry came out to assist me to alight from the carriage that had brought us from the station, one mid-October day, to the end of his honored and useful life, his friendship for us knew no variableness nor shadow of turning. He was already my husband’s staunch right hand in church and community. He took me upon trust for the time. I learned to love husband and wife long before we became separate households. To this day, his widow is to me as a sister. In the care-free three months of our happy companionship, Mrs. Henry helped me tactfully through the initial stages of acquaintanceship with parish and neighborhood. To the manor born, and connected by blood with two-thirds of the best families in the county, her gentle “coaching” was an inestimable benefit to the stranger within her gates.
Her husband was a grandson of Patrick Henry, and a lawyer of note, although not yet thirty years of age. He attained eminence in his native county as time went on, and in Richmond, to which city he removed after the War. His Life and Letters of Patrick Henry is a standard biographical and historical classic; he filled with distinction several public offices, among them that of President of the American Historical Society, and Delegate to the Historical Congress at The Hague, in 1897.
In private life he was the best of husbands and fathers, sweet-hearted to the core, a thorough gentleman always and everywhere, and a genial and delightful comrade. When I turned study and pen in the direction of Colonial historical research, he was an invaluable auxiliary. I told him, over and over, that he was to me an exhaustless reservoir of information. I had only to open a sluiceway, to draw in copious measure in my hour of need. As a faint expression of my sense of overwhelming obligation to him, I dedicated to him my first volume on Colonial Homesteads and Their Stories, published in 1896.
I cannot say that my thirst for Colonial traditions and histories was created by my residence in Charlotte. From childhood I had been indefatigable in the pursuit of genealogical details and the tales of real life and happenings collected from the converse of my elders of the “former days,” which they rated as better than these in defiance of Solomon’s admonition. But it was not possible to live for three years, as I did, in a region where the very earth was soaked in historical associations; where every other name mentioned in my hearing was interwoven with recitals of deeds of valor and of statesmanship performed by the fathers of American history, and not be kindled into zealous prosecution of my favorite studies.
The Court House, built in 1823, was designed by Thomas Jefferson. A more interesting building was a shabby, tumbledown house, not far from the site of the newer and better edifice. It was the “Court House” in the stirring days when the paternal Government would not squander money upon Colonial seats of justice. From the porch of this, Patrick Henry delivered his last speech to his adoring constituents. He was tottering upon the verge of the grave, into which he sank gently a few weeks later. A crisis of national and state importance had called him from his home at Red Hill, a dozen miles away. Keyed up by a sense of the imminence of the peril to the country he had saved, his magnificent will-power responded to the call; the dying fire leaped high. He had never reasoned more cogently, never pleaded with more power than on that day. But as the last word fell from his lips, he sank fainting into the arms of his attendants. Dr. John Holt Rice stood on the outskirts of the crowd. As the dying lion fell in his tracks, the clergyman cried out: “The sun has set in all his glory!”
From the same homely rostrum John Randolph (whose homestead of “Roanoke” is but a few miles from the county-seat) made his maiden speech, and addressed for the last time those of whom he declared—“No other man ever had such constituents.” In this address he recounted the history of that relation, from the hour when the beardless boy had raised his reedy voice to confute the arguments of the people’s idol—Patrick Henry—to the date of this, his resignation of his office.
“Men of Charlotte!” The piercing voice that carried further in his weakness than more stentorian tones, sent the farewell to the outskirts of the breathless throng—“Forty years ago you confided this sacred trust to me. Take it back! Take it back!”
The gesture, as of rolling a ponderous weight from heart and arms, was never forgotten by those who saw it. With it he left the platform, mounted his horse without another word, and rode off to Roanoke.