June in the Shenandoah Valley!
My sister Jo and I had academic parents, and we grew up in college towns in Virginia. She now lives in Richmond, Virginia. Last year we realized we hadn’t laid eyes on each other for two years. We decided we’d do a sister trip every year in June. This year, we drove about an hour west to Charlottesville, near the Shenandoah National Park.
First we embarked on winery tour. The mountainsides above the city are dotted with wineries and vineyards, and we took an Uber to two of them—Michael Shaps with expansive views of the valley and a lovely merlot, and Blenheim Winery, which is owned by Dave Matthews of the Dave Matthews Band. The latter features a glass floor that gives a view of the cellars and the barrels of wine.
Then we returned to the town where we lived 60 years ago when our dad was getting his doctorate. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get pictures of the tiny WWII-era tenement we shared with our many brothers. The university apparently didn’t recognize the historical significance of the house, and demolished the whole neighborhood to build a gym and parking lot.
Otherwise, the city has preserved a lot of this historic city, the home of our third president, Thomas Jefferson. He founded and partly designed the university central campus as an “Academical Village”. This is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It’s an epically beautiful campus: Red brick buildings, white columns, green lawns, extensive gardens, very Georgian and symmetrical.
Jo was a student here long ago, and showed me “the Lawn,” which is a long green lined with colonnaded pavilions leading to the Rotunda, which Jefferson modeled on the Roman Pantheon.
For almost 200 years, a few students have been privileged to live in tiny one room flats behind those colonnades. (Faculty had more substantial lodging above in the pavilions.) These were pretty primitive rooms—no bathrooms, no heat, no air conditioning. But getting chosen to live in one was a great honor. Now they have heat and air conditioning, but students still have to walk outside to go to the common restrooms.
Many high-achieving students have occupied these rooms, and Edgar Allan Poe was probably the most important, at least to me—my master’s thesis was an analysis of three of his “women buried alive” stories. Now Poe was not a successful student. Oh, he did do well in his studies, becoming the top student in both French and Latin. But his foster father refused to send him enough to pay his bills, and he turned to gambling. After only a year, he was woefully in debt and had to drop out.
Before he left, Poe etched a poem into the window glass in Room 13. (Of course the master of horror would live in #13.)
O Thou timid one, let not thy
Form rest in slumber within these
Unhallowed walls,
For herein lies
The ghost of an awful crime.
It’s not known what the awful crime is (maybe his expulsion?). But the room is preserved as a mini-museum with furnishings in the style Poe would have used.
Next post, I’ll describe another memorial to the history of the campus—The Memorial to Enslaved Laborers (MEL).