Stranica 144 [144]
RICHMOND AND VICINITY
Davis, Winnie and Mrs. Hayes felt it was their home when they
made their visits to Richmond after Mr. Davis’ death.
There Mr. Matthew Arnold visited, and a long list of
‘‘worthies,”’ never ending.
My mother, the wife of the oldest son, lived in the wing room
toward Jefferson Street, whilst her husband, a colonel in the Con¬
federate Army, was at the front. In the dead of night, the rest
of the family being in the second story, she often heard a dis¬
affected slave passing coal and provisions out of the basement door
under her room to the Northern sympathizers.
But let us go through the house on to another old-fashioned
porch, the east end of which was a charming greenhouse, and
thence to the garden. In the writer’s memory it was the more
formal terraced garden, at the end of which was a long line of
maple trees, back of which a grape arbor extended the whole
width of the garden, thus screening from the view of the house the
stables, yards, etc., which opened on Main Street—on a much
lower level than the garden. But to the child, that stable guarded
so closely by old ‘‘Uncle’’ Sam, the coachman, held delights as in¬
teresting as the garden. The tuberoses, mignonette, heliotrope
and, O, such tea roses! were beautiful, but the glamour of the big
old landau, the victoria, the glittering silver-mounted harness, the
spirited horses! To penetrate there spelled heaven to the childish
mind.
The accompanying picture only gives a poor view of one of the
four terraces which formed the garden, and no idea of the long
side lawn extending from Franklin to Main Street. But it does
show some of the trees of the original garden—the lindens and the
paulownias. This view was taken after the death of General An¬
derson and when the property had been sold to give way to the
Jefferson Hotel. And the borders, etc., look in it little as they
had under the care of my grandmother. One hears much now of
the “‘Newport Pink” and such “‘novelties’” of these days. There
used to be always planted there thick masses of geranium, just the
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