Virginia’s Lost History

Written By Unknown on Senin, 26 November 2012 | 17.35

Vanessa Vick for The New York Times

The 1,900-acre plantation that is the site of Stratford Hall, birthplace of Robert E. Lee, has impressive views of cliffs along the Potomac River. More Photos »

"LET me get up out of here," said Captain Red, rheumy, slow moving, a snowy thatch belying the nickname of his youth.

Captain Red scraped his stool back from the counter at the Car Wash Cafe, a modest restaurant in a former Shell station, placed two fives by the register and gave the waitress a wink.

"See you in my dreams," Captain Red said.

"Those will be good dreams," Cynthia Henry, the waitress, coolly replied.

"O.K., Sweetie," Captain Red said.

"Drive fast and take chances," Ms. Henry added as Captain Red shambled toward the exit, probably unaware that he'd been punked.

That was in July. Now it's October. Captain Red has been taking few chances on the highway. Here he is again at the counter. And here is Cynthia Henry serving fresh-brewed coffee with sass on the side.

I am back on the Northern Neck of Virginia, a region where it begins to seem that I've been pitched by fate. Two years ago I'd never heard of the place. Then a friend invited me to his farm on a bluff overlooking the Rappahannock River for a visit, later lending me the house while he was away as somewhere to regain my bearings after a series of sudden and unexpected deaths.

In the middle of last summer, another good friend, a director of the association responsible for preserving Stratford Hall, the historic Robert E. Lee birthplace and plantation, proffered an invitation: Would I like to use her cabin there as a place in which to start work on a book?

And so it was that I passed the shank of a blistering Tidewater summer amid 1,900 acres set on high bluffs at the northern limit of the Neck, swilling iced tea as squirrels pelted the roof of my tidy and well-appointed cabin with acorns. Writing from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., I set out in my car every afternoon to travel down empty roads en route to seldom visited precolonial homesteads; parking at the edges of steep shore-side cliffs framed by vast marine skies a friend termed "deluxe"; wandering down a time tunnel into a past that, to renew an overused paraphrase of Faulkner, is not dead and not, for that matter, even past.

My American history, in the manner of a solipsistic generation, has tended to begin and end with myself. I had never bothered to learn much about the people who produced me; I had paid even less attention to the circumstances that created the nation or the colony in which they got their American start. Fear not: the history lesson will be brief.

Sleepy and rural, gently undulating, known variously as "the garden of Virginia" and "the Athens of the New World," the Northern Neck is a 61-mile peninsula bracketed by the Rappahannock and Potomac rivers and the Chesapeake Bay.

Originally settled by members of eight Algonquian tribes, it was scouted in the early 17th century by Capt. John Smith, the English explorer, and eventually settled by planters whose impressive wealth derived mainly from stoking a global demand for a modish new stimulant: tobacco.

The British historian Arnold J. Toynbee once wrote that never was there a crop of genius such as was produced here in the colonial era. For the production of genius, it seems, Northern Neck soil was especially rich.

George Washington was born here near a bend of pretty Popes Creek, and so in other nearby towns were James Madison and James Monroe. Among other early colonists who got their start in life on the Northern Neck were the brothers Richard Henry Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee, both signatories of the Declaration of Independence, and their descendant, the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

The Lees' ancestral great house — an imposing H-shaped structure noted for its elegantly laid brickwork facade, high chimneys and a cube-shaped great room acknowledged as among the handsomest chambers in the United States — was built on a rise commanding a broad and strategic view of the Potomac, and was just a short walk along a farm road from my cabin in the woods.

GUY TREBAY is a reporter for The New York Times.


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