Southern Splendor by Marc R. Matrana Robin S. Lattimore & Michael W. Kitchens

Author:Marc R. Matrana, Robin S. Lattimore & Michael W. Kitchens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2018-03-24T04:00:00+00:00

The mansion known as the “White House of the Confederacy” is today dwarfed by the towering hospital complex of the Medical College of Virginia and other office buildings, in Richmond, Virginia. In its earliest years the home had a view of the James River in the distance. (Bush)

WHITE HOUSE OF THE CONFEDERACY

Caught in Time

Richmond, Virginia

In the minds of many southerners, time stood still at the corner of East Clay and 12th Streets in Richmond, Virginia, the moment Jefferson Davis left the home on Sunday evening, April 2, 1865, to escape approaching Union troops, who inevitably ransacked the city and took possession of the dwelling that had come to be known as the White House of the Confederacy.

In reality, time has not stood still. The home, which once looked down across a wooded hillside to the banks of the James River, is now dwarfed by the towering hospital complex of the Medical College of Virginia and located only a few feet away from a branch facility of the American Civil War Museum. As a result, the mansion appears out of place in a modern, urban landscape that resembles many cities in America.

Time does slip away, however, when stepping across the threshold of the mansion into rooms that are steeped in history. Due to a successful restoration project in the early 1980s that returned the home to its 1865 appearance, visitors are indeed visually transported back to that spring long ago when the Davis family still resided in the mansion and the South was a separate nation.

The story of the gray stuccoed neoclassical-style mansion began many years before its principal role in the Civil War. It was built in 1818 for John Brockenbrough, who was then serving as president of the Bank of Virginia, for $20,000. Located two blocks north of the Virginia Capitol Building, the dwelling was designed by master architect Robert Mills, who designed many important structures in America including the Washington Monument and the United States Treasury building, both in Washington, DC.1

Mills’s design for the Brockenbrough home produced a grand two-and-one-half-story, 14,000-square-foot dwelling with vastly different front and rear façades. A pair of fluted, Ionic columns support a simple porch over the main Clay Street entrance. In contrast, Mills designed a monumental portico with four pairs of Doric columns stretching across the entire expanse of the home’s garden front. An uncovered porch leads from that space down the east side of the home providing a sheltered entrance to the service floor below.

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