Grape vines over the porch of an old outbuilding at Struan, Arden, North Carolina, 1938, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Detail of the above; note the potted plants on the old ladder.
By the time Johnston photographed the old plantation of Struan for her Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South, the property had been a school for boys, Christ School, for 38 years.
“Old Birds’ Nest Tavern, Marionville vic., Northampton County, [on the Eastern Shore of] Virginia,” ca. 1930s, by Frances Benjamin Johnson, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. (Marionville was also known as Birdsnest.)
Beautiful summer meadow around the house. . .
Johnston’s notes on the photograph call the building a “sailors’ tavern.” It was probably one half to two miles from the creeks and marshes of Hog Island Bay on the Atlantic Ocean, maybe closer.
Her notes also say that it was “the first three story house in the country [county?].”
According to a 1927 economic and social survey of Northampton County, “[f]rom the low room in the middle of this building originated the name of ‘Bird’s Nest’.”
Unfortunately, I can’t find anything to indicate that it has survived to the present day.
When the world turns completely upside down
You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore
Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore;
We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town, . . .
We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown.— Elinor Wylie, from “Wild Peaches“
Driveway, Castle Hill, Charlottesville, Virginia, 1926, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The original house on the plantation of Castle Hill was built in 1764 by Dr. Thomas Walker and his wife Mildred. Walker was a friend of Peter Jefferson and later guardian to his son,Thomas.
At the time of this photo, the property was owned by his descendant, Amélie Louise Rives Troubetzkoy, a novelist married to a Russian prince who eventually ran somewhat short of funds.
By the fall of 1938, when future novelist Louis Auchincloss, then a law student at the University of Virginia, came to have tea with the aging princess, he found her living in “romantic, impoverished isolation in a decaying manor house.” To get to the house, he had to find his way through a double row of aromatic box hedges that rose up three stories high and were so enormous that his bulky Pontiac could barely pass through. The awe-inspiring hedges even became the subject of one of Amélie’s poems, which she wrote in middle age. She ends the poem with “Hedges of Box,/Hedges of Magic./…Behind your barrier of glad enchantment/I have rediscovered reality.” The reality Amélie envisioned had herself within the encircling wall of boxwood, still a young beauty of twenty-one, seated on the back of a unicorn.
— Donna M. Lucey, from “The Temptress of Castle Hill,” Garden and Gun
Today, the estate is still privately owned. Its remaining 1,203 acres (from the original 15,000) have been permanently protected against development by a conservation easement with The Nature Conservancy.
The conservatory of “The Causeway,” or James Parmelee house, Northwest Washington, D.C., 1919, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The estate has also been called Twin Oaks and Tregaron. Its 1912 house still stands, and some of the land is a campus for the Washington International School.
James Parmelee was a Cleveland financier and co-founder of the National Carbon Company.
More winter gardens are here.
“Lynch Farm, St. Mary’s County, Maryland,” 1936 or 1937, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
You can scroll through over a year’s worth of Sunday porches here.
Continue reading “The Sunday porch: St. Mary’s County”
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