Southern Gothic

Drewry's Mansion: "a thing of serene beauty"

  No mansion faces Mansion Avenue between 21st and Lone streets in South Richmond. The name is a tangential reference to the Drewry Mansion, which stood near present-day Harwood and 18th streets.

  The "proprietor and designer," according to a Works Progress Administration survey of 1936, was Maj. Henry Tandy Drewry, a War of 1812 veteran who founded his country seat, a rural manor with a sophisticated, urbane architectural lineage, around 1846 -1850.

  Born in 1795, Drewry earned his fortune from commercial ventures. He became the owner of up to 500 slaves. They worked his 1,500-acre Chesterfield County estate of "broad fertile fields and towering forests" that was carved from holdings amassed by the region's first families.

  Near Drewry's site in the mid-17^th century was the stone house built by Thomas Stegg (Stegge or Stagg) Jr. Stegg willed his extensive lands to his nephew and Richmond's founder William Byrd I and it was in that, or another stone house, where in 1674 William Byrd II was born. The Byrd family came to  control 1,800 acres in what was called the Falls Plantation. Remnants either of those early houses (or Drewry's 1840s stone stables) were visible into the mid-20th century.

  Drewry's two-story brick house had 15 rooms, with 12-foot ceilings and a spacious "English" basement. It conveyed a sense of grandness exceeding its size, thanks in part to ornate, Italianate two-story porches on its western-facing front and its south side and an imposing rear piazza allowing for a river vista. A sweeping, circular central staircase decorated by statue niches added drama and romance. There was a roof garden. Great, old oaks surrounded the house, and landscaping included a boxwood-lined drive.

  This home for Henry, his wife, Martha Amelia, and their children, Samuel Davies, Henry Martyn, Sara (Sally) Roberta and Mary Elizabeth, became a center of social activity, with corn-shucking season in early December heralding a particularly boisterous event.

  Corn pulled from the stalks got hauled in and piled up in the barnyard, where shuckers worked on the heaps from all sides. A feast proceeded. Hogs, sheep, ducks and turkeys were butchered, and kegs of wine and whiskey were brought out, with beer made by slaves. The nightlong revelry occasioned visitors, including slaves, from other houses and plantations.

  The Drewrys soon had no reason to party.

  The Civil War boomed and thudded below the mansion in 1862 and 1864 at Drewry's Bluff (the 90-foot cliff was named for neighbor Capt. Augustus H. Drewry). When the ruined Henry Drewry died in 1866 his estate totaled 136 acres. Judge Joel Parker of Massachusetts lived in the house between 1872-1885. Complicated legal disputes over the property arose after the judge's death. Dartmouth College became the ultimate benefactor.

  In the years that followed, Drewry's passed through less capable hands. The fields grew over, nearly all the glass in the house was broken and the first floor sank three feet. The place would've fallen into itself except for the 1921 intervention of successful Richmond businessman James K. Beard,  whose guiding  passions were old houses and antiques. A 1925 article reported that he owned four portraits by Thomas Sully, an 18th century American painter. 

  He cleared the lawns except for the oldest trees, cleaned and trimmed the old boxwoods, which he was offered thousands to sell, rebuilt the floors, installed new windows, and replaced the roof garden's railing and all the gutters. Beard decorated the grounds with statuary including cast iron deer and dogs, "and painted hitching posts in the form of little Negro boys."  He constructed a fishpond with stones from nearby ruins (either Drewry's stables or the Byrd houses) and stocked it with goldfish, perch and bass.

  By 1938, old and unable to take care of the house, Beard sold it to fellow antiques enthusiasts the Austin Bullocks. But soon the parceling began that by the end stranded Drewry's Mansion in a lattice of working-class suburban streets near Oak Grove Elementary School. The annexation of 1942 placed Drewry's in Richmond. The city purchased it and waited. Mrs. Bullock was invalided in 1954, then her husband was hospitalized. She died in 1964.

  Drewry's had deteriorated with appropriately grim Southern Gothic style. Vis-iting the mansion for the Times Dispatch in 1964, reporter Linda Murphy witnessed a truncated front yard overrun by "boxwood taller than good-sized Texans," hollyhocks and weeds. Prying fingers of ivy shoved through broken windows and pulled away tattered curtains. Huge oaks and sycamores allowed "only stray bits of sunshine to filter through," and Murphy described the mansion as "brooding darkly . . . isolated from its modern surroundings, whispering to itself of bygone eras."

  No eccentric rescuer came when Drewry's most needed one.

  The house was pulled down in August 1964 to make way for Oak Grove Elementary's playground.    (June 2002)