Virginia: the Old Dominion Part 7

Next morning we were ready for a visit to Brandon. But first, we had to let the sailor make a foraging trip to the village. One of the troubles about living in a home that wanders on the waters, is that each time you change anchorage you must hunt up new places for getting things and getting things done.

While it is charming to drop anchor every now and then in a snug, new harbour, where Nature, as she tucks you in with woodland green, has smiles and graces that you never saw before, yet the houseboater soon learns that each delightful, new-found pocket in the watery world means necessity for several other new-found things. There must be a new-found washerwoman, and new-found somebodies who can supply meats, eggs, vegetables, ice, milk, and water--the last two separate if possible.

True, the little harbour is beautiful; but as you lie there day after day watching waving trees and rippling water, the soiled-clothes bags are growing fatter; and then too, even in the midst of beauty, one wearies of a life fed wholly out of tin cans.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ENTRANCE TO CHIPPOAK CREEK.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: COVE IN CHIPPOAK CREEK.]

Henry was a good forager; and we were confident, as his strong strokes carried him from the houseboat sh.o.r.eward, that he would soon put us in touch with all the necessary sources of supply, so that in the afternoon we could make our visit to the old manor-house. And he did not fail us. His little boat came back well loaded, and he bore the welcome news that "Sally" (whoever she might be) would take the was.h.i.+ng.

But now, a matter of religion got in between us and Brandon. A launch came down the creek; and, as we were nearly out of gasoline, the Commodore hailed the craft and made inquiry as to where we could get some. One of the two men aboard proved to deal in gasoline, and appeared to be the only one about who did. He had some of it then on the pier at Claremont; and would sell it any day in the week except Sat.u.r.day. The rather puzzling exception he explained by saying that he was a Seventh-day Adventist. To be sure, it was then only Thursday; but as it seemed making up for bad weather that might prevent our running down to the pier next day, we arranged to take on a barrel of the gasoline that afternoon.

We started after a rather late dinner; and ran back down the river to where we had seen the schooner and the barges the day before. Just as the Commodore made a nice, soft-b.u.mp landing at the pier, a man informed him that the gasoline had been carried to the Adventist's mill by mistake. So, we cast off our ropes again, and went farther down to where the little mills steamed away at the foot of the bluffs.

Off sh.o.r.e, several sloops and rowboats were tied to tall stakes in the water. We went as close to sh.o.r.e as we dared; and Gadabout crept cautiously up to one of the stakes, so as not to knock it over, and was tied to it. Then, the Commodore went ash.o.r.e and arranged to have the gasoline brought out to us.

Presently, two negroes rolled the barrel into a lighter. They poled their awkward craft out to Gadabout and made fast to a cleat. It took a long time to pump the gasoline into cans, and then to strain it into our tank on the upper deck. The day was about over. Relinquis.h.i.+ng our plan of visiting Brandon, we ran back to our Chippoak harbour, and our anchor went to bed in the creek as the sun went down.

CHAPTER XI

AT THE PIER MARKED "BRANDON"

It was late on the following afternoon when Gadabout was out of the creek, out in the river, and bound for the little pier marked _Brandon_.

A belated steamboat was swas.h.i.+ng down stream, and a schooner, having but little of wind and less of tide to help it along, was rocking listlessly in the long swell. In the shadow of the slack sails a man sprawled upon the schooner's deck, while against the old-fas.h.i.+oned tiller another leaned lazily.

Gadabout had to make quite a detour to get around some shad-net poles before she could head in toward the Brandon wharf; and her roundabout course gave time for a thought or two upon the famous old river plantation.

Starting but a few years after those first colonists landed at Jamestown Island, the story of Brandon is naturally a long one. But, working on the scale of a few words to a century, we may get the gist of it in here.

Among those first settlers was one Captain John Martin, a considerable figure of those days and a member of the Council appointed by the King for the government of the colony. He seems to have been the only man who believed in holding on at James Towne after the horrors of the "Starving Time." He made vigorous protest when the settlers took to the s.h.i.+ps and abandoned the settlement.

About 1616, he secured a grant of several thousand acres of land in the neighbourhood of this creek that we were now lying in, and the estate became known as Brandon--Martin's Brandon. The terms of the grant were so unusually favourable that they came near making the Captain a little lord in the wilderness. He was to "enjoye his landes in as large and ample manner to all intentes and purposes as any Lord of any Manours in England dothe holde his grounde." And he certainly started out to do it.

But soon the General a.s.sembly attacked the lordly prerogatives of the owner of Martin's Brandon. It did not relish the idea of making laws for everybody in the colony except John Martin, and he was requested to relinquish certain of his high privileges. This he refused to do, saying, "I hold my patente for my service don, which noe newe or late comers can meritt or challenge." After a while, however, he was induced to surrender the objectionable "parte of his patente," and manorial Brandon became like any other great estate in the colony.

After several changes of owners.h.i.+p, Brandon came into the possession of another prominent colonial family, the Harrisons. The founder of this Virginia house (the various branches of which have given us so many men prominent in our colonial and national life) was Benjamin Harrison, one of the early settlers, a large land holder, and a member of the Council. His son Benjamin (also a man of position in the colony and a member of the Council) was probably the first of the family to hold lands at Brandon.

But it was not until the third generation that the Harrisons became thoroughly identified with the two great plantations that have ever since been a.s.sociated with the name; Benjamin Harrison, the third, acquiring Berkeley, and his brother Nathaniel completing the acquisition of the broad acres of Brandon. Berkeley pa.s.sed to strangers many years ago; but Brandon has come down through unbroken succession from the Harrisons of over two centuries ago to the Harrisons of to-day.

That makes a great many Harrisons. And as it happened, while Gadabout was on her way that day to visit their ancestral home, a genealogical chart with its maze of family ramifications was lying on a table in the forward cabin, and Henry saw it.

"King's sake!" he exclaimed. "That must be the host they couldn't count. Don't you know John say how he saw a host no man could number?

That's cert'nly them!"

As we approached the Brandon pier, we saw a man on it who proved to be the gardener and who helped to handle our ropes as we made our landing.

Then, with the aid of a beautiful collie, he led us up the slope toward the still invisible homestead.

Entering the wooded grounds through quaint, old-fas.h.i.+oned gateways, we followed our guide along a trail that topped the river bluff, where honeysuckle ran riot in the shrubbery and tumbled in confusion to the beach below. The trail ended in a cleared spot on the crest of the bluff--a river lookout, where one could rest upon the rustic seat and enjoy the ever-varying picture of water, sky, and sh.o.r.e.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RIVERWARD FRONT OF BRANDON.]

But we turned our backs upon it all, for to us it was not yet Brandon.

Now, our course lay directly away from the river along a broad avenue of yielding turf, straight through an aged garden. Above were the arching boughs of giant trees; below and all about, a wealth of old-fas.h.i.+oned bloom. The sunlight drifted through shadowing fringe-trees, mimosas, magnolias, and oaks. h.o.a.ry old age marked the garden in the breadth of the box, in the height of the slow-growing yews, and in the denseness of the ivy that swathed the great-girthed trees. It all lay basking in the soft, mellow light of sunset, in the hush of coming twilight, like some garden of sleep.

Suddenly, the grove and the garden ended and we were over the threshold of a square of sward, an out-of-door reception room, no tree or shrub encroaching. Beyond this was a row of sentinel trees; and then a ma.s.sive hedge of box with a break in the middle where stood the white portal of Brandon. We could tell little about the building. The eye could catch only a charming confusion: foliage-broken lines of wall and roof; ivy-framed windows; and, topping all, just above the deep green of a magnolia tree, the white carved pineapple of welcome and hospitality.

In the softened light of evening, the charm of the place was upon us--old Brandon, standing tree-shadowed and dim, its storied walls in time-toned tints, its seams and crannies traced in the greens of moss and lichen, its ancient air suggestive, secretive,

"In green old gardens hidden away From sight of revel and sound of strife."

We entered a large, dusky hall with white pillars and arches midway, and with two rooms opening off from it--the dining-room on the one hand, the drawing-room on the other. In the old chimney-pieces, fire leaped behind quaint andirons taking the chill from the evening air.

And there in the dusk and the fire-glow, where shadows half hid and half revealed, where old mahogany now loomed dark and now flashed back the flickering light, where old-time worthies fitfully came and went upon the shadowy, panelled walls--we made our acquaintance with Brandon and with the gracious lady of the manor. Our talk ran one with the hour and the dusk and the firelight--old days, old ways, and all that Brandon stands for.

When our twilight call was over, it was with dreamy thoughts on the far days of Queen Anne and of the Georges that we went from the white-pillared portico down the worn stone steps and followed a side path back toward our boat. In the gloaming the side-lights were being put in place, and Gadabout turned a baleful green eye upon us, as though overhearing our talk of such unnautical things as gardens and heirlooms and ancestral halls.

Next morning there was much puffing of engines and ringing of signal bells down in Chippoak Creek. Gadabout went ahead and backed and sidled. And it was all to find a new way to go to Brandon. Mrs.

Harrison had told us of a landing-place in the woods at the creek side from which a sort of roadway led to the house. Fortunately, our charts indicated, near this landing, a small depression in the bed of the creek where there would be sufficient depth of water for our houseboat to float even at low tide. At last, we got over the flats and into the hole in the bottom of the creek that seemed to have been made for us.

We rowed ash.o.r.e to a yellow crescent of sandy beach shaded by cypresses where a cart-path led off through the woods. We called it the woods-way to Brandon. It followed the sh.o.r.e of the creek a little way, and through the leafy screen we caught glimpses of Gadabout out in the stream, now with a cone-tipped branch of pine and again with a star-leaved limb of sweet gum for a foreground setting.

Farther along were many dogwood trees; and in the springtime these woods must be dotted with those white blossom-tents that so charmed the first settlers on their way up the river. Here, for the first time, we came upon the trailing cedar spreading its feathery carpet under the trees. Ferns lifted their fronds in thick, wavy cl.u.s.ters. The freshness from a night storm was upon every growing thing; a clearing northwest wind was in the tree-tops; and the air was filled with the spicy sweetness of the woodland.

The way led out of the shadow of the trees into the open, and we came upon "the quarters"--long, low buildings with patches of corn and sweet potatoes about them. Two coloured women were digging in the gardens and another was busy over an out-of-door washtub. A group of picaninnies played about a steaming kettle swung upon a cross-stick above an open-air fire. One fat brown baby sat in a doorway poking a pudgy thumb into a saucer of food and keeping very watchful eyes on the strangers.

Beyond the quarters were barns and some small houses.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A SIDE PATH TO THE MANOR-HOUSE.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WOODS-WAY TO BRANDON.]

And here was our first reminder of a distressing chapter in the story of Brandon. We knew that but few of these buildings were old-time outbuildings of the estate. The Civil War bore hard upon this as upon other homes along the James. It left little upon the plantation except the old manor-house itself, and that injured and defaced.

On ahead, we could see the great grove in which the manor-house stands, looming up in the midst of the cleared land like a small forest reservation. Our route this time brought us to the homestead from the landward side through an open park, and we got a better view of the building than the dense foliage on the other side had permitted. The house is of the long colonial type, consisting of a square central building, two large flanking wings, and two connecting corridors. It is built of brick laid in Flemish bond, showing a broken pattern of glazed headers. Each front has its wide central porch and double-door entranceway.

The emblem of hospitality that tops the central roof is truly characteristic of the spirit within. Old colonial worthies, foreign dignitaries, presidents and their cabinets, house-parties of "Virginia cousins," and "strangers within the gates"--all have known the open hospitality of Brandon. And the two latest strangers now moved on a.s.sured of kindly welcome at the doorway.

Entering Brandon from the landward front, we found ourselves again in the large central hall. It is divided midway by arches resting on fluted Ionic columns and has a fine example of the colonial staircase.

This hall and the drawing-room and the dining-room on either side of it cover the entire ground floor of the central building. Offices and bedrooms occupy the wings. The rooms are lofty, and most of them have fireplaces and panelled walls.

Through the east doorway one looks down a long vista to the river. In the sunlight it is striking: the shadows from the dense foliage before the portal lie black upon the gra.s.s; beyond is the stretch of sunny sward; and then the turf walk under meeting boughs, a green tunnel through whose far opening one sees a bit of brown river and perhaps a white glint of sail.

In drawing-room and dining-room are gathered numerous paintings forming a collection well known as the Brandon Gallery. It represents the work of celebrated old court painters and of notable early American artists.

[Ill.u.s.tration: IN THE DRAWING-ROOM.]