Stranica 343 [343]
OCR
sO SET SSS eee ee HisToR tc (‘GARDENS (OF: Vikmernia am At this time his mother moved into the Falls cottage, a commodious brick house, now in existence near the site of the original dwelling. Of the six children of Francis III and Anne Thornton, Francis IV was the only son. His mother brought to Fall Hull with her Katina, an Indian woman, who had attended her from her infancy, who had been given originally to Governor Spotswood by an itinerant tribe of Indians when he was on one of his many exploring expeditions to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Francis IV personally told Colonel James Innes Thornton of Alabama, his son, that he could remember Katina’s taking him and his five sisters into the woods and covering them with leaves while she called, with strange and beautiful cries, the birds of the forest, which would come and rest around them. Her grave is still well marked among six old oaks back of the Fall Hill house. After this, Francis Thornton was always a friend of the Indians, and the latter frequently called upon him at Fall Hill when they were passing near the place. In 1837, when Francis Thornton IV died, his family scattered, and for some years the place was tenanted by the family nurse, Mammy Nancy. In 1843, his granddaughter, Bessie Forbes, inherited it in part. After her marriage to Dr. John R. Taylor, the latter, by purchase, added to his wife’s portion many acres of the original plantation. In 1868, General Robert E. Lee was a guest at Fall Hill, and Mrs. Taylor, who then owned the place, called his attention to the shattered trunk of a tree, the top of which had been shot away by a Federal cannon. Though rapidly being overgrown with ivy, Mrs. Taylor was preserving this tree trunk as an object of historic interest. Instead of showing the interest she expected, General Lee advised her not to preserve it at all, but to obliterate as far as possible every trace of the unfortunate war. Mrs. Taylor died in 1876, and upon her husband’s death in 1882 the property was divided by lot among his four sons and one daughter, Bessie Thompson Taylor. ‘The house, with considerable [214]
