University of Virginia Library

XXII. The Hotel-Keepers

There was no department in the system of his new
University which Jefferson was not solicitous to invest
with scholastic dignity, even if that dignity should fail to
pierce below the shadow to the substance. The janitor
himself was at first expected to be a man with skill enough
to handle the philosophical apparatus in the most delicate
experiments. How was it possible to bring the hotel-keeper,
—whose only real duty was presumably to satisfy
the appetites of the students,—into the magic circle of
that student's purely intellectual interests? He might be
a tactful manager of servants, an unerring judge of beef,
mutton, and veal, and an expert in all the countless varieties
of Virginia breads and desserts; he might be able to
discriminate to a nicety between the best shade of cooking
and the next best, at a single tasting; he might have an
extraordinary aptitude for obtaining the earliest vegetables,
the most recently laid eggs, the freshest butter, the
plumpest poultry,—in short, he might be the pattern of
all that a well-informed, honest, energetic, and bountiful
hotel-keeper should be, and yet be unable to contribute
one cubit further to the intellectual stature of his
boarders.

Jefferson's ingenuity,—which was able to convert the
blank ceiling of the Rotunda into a starred and constellated
celestial vault, and to change a simple walking stick,
by a twist of the fingers, into a comfortable and handy
seat,—was quite equal to finding a distinct scholastic use
for the hotel-keeper, apart from his daily ministrations

to hungry youthful stomachs. His plan, it will be recalled,
for the first of the "refectories," as he mediaevally designated
the University boarding houses,—under the spell,
no doubt, of the cell-like dormitories, and the monastic
arcades,—was to use it as a seminary for colloquial
French. It was to be rented to a French family, and
only the French tongue was to be spoken at its tables.
The students were to drop their own vernacular and
employ, to the best of their ability, the language of
France. The hotel-keeper was to turn the intervals between
courses to linguistic account by correcting faulty
accents and suggesting more correct grammatical usages.

The plan was not so fantastic as it seemed. Many
Americans have picked up an excellent knowledge of the
French tongue in private homes in Paris,—the shortest
way of learning,—and there was no reason why twenty-five
students, taking their meals in a small hotel within
the precincts of the University of Virginia, should not
have gradually acquired a fair acquaintance with colloquial
French at least. If it was possible to set up a
French seminary in one hotel, why should not a Spanish
seminary be established in another, an Italian in a third,
and a German in a fourth? Jefferson undoubtedly canvassed
such a plan in his own mind, and was anything impossible
with a philosopher, who, standing upon his own
academic lawn, could look around and see his native blue
sky indented by the tops of those exotic Roman temples
and baths which he himself had erected? A man who
was able to plant on Virginian soil such an architectural
group as that, would not have wanted the power to carry
out any other innovation which had received his own
approval.

Cocke, who was not as prone as Cabell to be dazzled by
Jefferson's original schemes, no doubt joked a little on

the score of the novel French seminary that was actually
proposed, but he too had formed a very dignified con
ception of the part that the hotels should play in the Uni
versity life. "Let us stick to our resolution of reducing
their number," he said, "and by giving due notice of it,
we shall be able to pick out men of such stuff as will
really make our hotel faculty worthy of the other de
partments."

What did he mean by the expression "hotel faculty"?
This is only intelligible when we recall that the hotel-keeper
of the University, at that time, was presumed to
discharge several important functions besides supplying
his boarders with their daily food. We have seen that
he was required to visit their dormitories at regular intervals,
and in these tours of inspection, he was expected
to come into something more than a formal and shallow
intercourse with the occupants. The future was to prove
that this intercourse,—in some instances, at least,—was
to be confined to participation in the drinking and
gambling bouts of the students; but this possibility, which
was anticipated, made it all the more imperative that the
hotel-keepers should themselves be men who would set
a good and not a bad example. In the first place, they
were in reality health officers of the University,—certainly
to the extent of being obligated to maintain a condition
of perfect cleanliness in the dormitories, the points
from which most of the epidemics of that day started;
and in the second, they were the assistants to the proctor
in preserving good order throughout the precincts. They
could not only be called upon to aid in suppressing a riot
and checking every other form of turbulence, but they
were also under orders to report all minor violations of
the ordinances.

Against this last regulation, they, not unnaturally, were

disposed to revolt. The success of their hotels was
largely dependent upon their own popularity with their
respective sets of boarders, and they were afraid lest the
furtive observation which was expected of them, would
arouse the suspicion of their patrons and sour their goodwill.
In the beginning, before a definite row of dormitories
had been assigned to each hotel, this good-will was
indispensable to the keepers' success. Jefferson, in 1826,
complained to Joseph Coolidge that competition had
made them too obsequious to the wishes of the young
men. "We must force them to become auxiliaries
towards the preservation of order rather than supporters
of irregularities. We shall continue this evil until the
renewal of their leases." In September, 1827, at least
one-half of the students put off matriculating because sanguine
of obtaining greater advantages from the several
hotel-keepers, who were actively canvassing among them.
With such inducement, in these first years, to win the
young men's favor, there was small prospect that they
would conscientiously discharge their police duties; and
even after they were made independent of such good will,
they positively declined to testify about delinquencies,
unless peremptorily called upon to do so by the Faculty.[26]
In short, the hotel-keepers failed to perform the part
which was expected of them in the higher administration
of the University's affairs. Ordinances had actually to
be adopted to bring them under penalties for permitting
gaming and drinking beneath their roofs, or for receiving
students who had been dismissed or expelled
from the precincts. As we shall soon see, several were
compelled to leave the University, owing to this undisguised
indifference to their obligations.

When we come to examine the type of person selected,
during the period under review, for the position of hotel-keeper,
we soon perceive that it was not, as a rule, the
one represented by stern upholders of temperance, or
by rigid censors of the other popular forms of college dissipation.
It was calculated, at first, that the office would
bring in a net income of at least fifteen hundred dollars.
"This makes it a post," said Cocke, "that some of the
first men of the State, who have been unfortunate in
their circumstances, would be glad to accept." He was
right. There was no period in the history of Virginia,
before the War of Secession, in which so many families
of good and even distinguished birth, were so down at
the heel as at this time. The hotels were still in the
hands of the builders when there began to rise up a large
number of candidates of this class, who were not naturally
inclined towards careful management, and who
possessed no personal sympathy whatever with the austerities
of Puritanism. A taste for cards and for liquor
was then very general, and to set half a dozen men with
such tastes themselves over a large body of high-spirited
and self-indulgent young boarders was not the course that
was at all calculated to restrain the latter from imitating
the habits of so many of their elders.

These early hotel-keepers were, with one exception,
men who keenly relished their toddies and loved to shuffle

a pack of cards, either in their own apartments or in
the dormitories. At the spring term of the Circuit
Court of Albemarle, in 1826, several of them were actually
indicted by the grand jury for gaming. It was the
loose practice of the times, from which they can be no
more absolved than the students themselves.

Without an exception, they belonged to families of
high social position in the State. One of the earliest
applicants was Major Griffin Stith, of Petersburg, who
was warmly recommended by Charles Fenton Mercer;
and with equal amiability, Mercer also recommended
Mr. Ewell, of Prince William county, who had been
forced by the fall in agricultural prices to look to some
other calling for a livelihood. Mrs. Patton, daughter of
W. S. Crawford, of Amherst, found an earnest supporter
in Chapman Johnson, who, perhaps, correctly
thought that a woman could manage a University hotel
more successfully than most of the unfortunate gentlemen
whose names had been submitted. Thomas Burwell, a
member of Congress, was of the like opinion,—when a
vacancy occurred in 1827, he suggested the name of Mrs.
Nicholson, a daughter of Carter Wormeley, of Rosegill,
and, through him, a scion of the most distinguished social
stock in Virginia. She was described as a "woman of
great dignity of character and propriety of manner"; but
what was more pertinent, Mr. Burwell declared that she
was the best housekeeper whom he had ever known. A
few days later, Nicholas P. Trist advocated the claims of
T. E. Randolph, a kinsman of Jefferson himself. Mr.
Randolph was spoken of by Mr. Trist as a "spotless gentleman,"
and his family "as one of the most virtuous,
high-minded, and in every way meritorious families that
exist." There was a silence as to Mr. Randolph's practical

capacity; but his nomination, with that of Mrs.
Nicholson, indicates the high social standing of the persons
who sought the post.

Both Johnson and Breckinridge urged that the hotels
should be carried up to a second story, since, they said,
some persons would be influenced to seek their management
by the desire to educate a family of sons, for whom
there would be but small accommodation so long as the
buildings were of one flight only. This forewarning
proved to be correct. One of the reasons that led Mrs.
Nicholson to apply for the post was that she had four
sons whom she was anxious to enter in college; and the
same reason governed several of the candidates who were
successful in obtaining the office.

There were six hotel-keepers at the start,—John
Gray, G. W. Spotswood, Warner Minor, S. B. Chapman,
and John D. Richeson. Spotswood was a distant
cousin of Washington, and had received the name of his
celebrated kinsman. He was, from a personal point of
view, the most tempestuous figure in the entire erratic
group. He too had been induced to become a candidate
by the opportunity which the position opened up to educate
his six sons. His family numbered a wife and eight
children in all. He occupied the hotel standing at the
southeast end of East Range, and from the beginning,
cultivated very intimate and jovial relations with the
young men, even to the extent of drinking and playing
cards with them constantly, though punishable under the
ordinances; and this led, on several occasions, to violent
altercations, in which he claimed that he was so much
the innocent party that the offending students should have
been expelled. This brought him into collision with the
Faculty, who refused to accept his point of view. Being
of an impulsive temper, that brooked no disagreement, he

threw up his lease in 1827, on the ground that he had
been insulted by a student, and that the Faculty had
condoned the outrage. He declined to discharge further
the duties of his place, although his resignation had not
been acted upon; he refused, when called on, to give evidence
about a notorious gambler who had secretly
crawled within the precincts; and he conducted himself
generally in what Dunglison, writing to Cocke, described
"as the most reckless and extravagant manner." Some
of his boarders complained that he had failed to provide
them with beds; some that there were no pitchers, washbasins,
or andirons in their rooms, the consequence of
his default.

In spite of his choleric spirit, vehement moods, and
constant neglect of his dormitories, he was patiently retained
in his position; but before another year had passed,
he was again heels over head in a characteristic wrangle.
Entering the room of a student named Hove, who occupied
one of his apartments, he found him in bed, although
the hour of rising had long gone by. "Why are you
not up, sir?" Spotswood roughly asked. "I have no
fire," was the reply. "Why have you not had one made,
sir?" Spotswood again imperiously inquired. "If you
were more regular in your habits, sir, then we should be
more regular in making your fire, sir; and your dog, sir,
how can you expect the servant to clean up after a dog,
sir?" Further hot words were bandied between them.
Spotswood indignantly called Hove "a puppy," and
Hove quite naturally was provoked thereby to strike
Spotswood with the iron shovel snatched up from the
hearth. Again, Spotswood endeavored to have an
assaulter expelled, and again the Faculty refused to take
so summary a step. Then he abruptly resigned for the
second time. Asserting that "his feelings were more

deeply wounded than words could express," he nevertheless
exhibited a certain generosity of mind that was characteristic
of him in spite of dissipated habits and an
ungovernable temper. "Permit me in my poor way,"
he wrote the chairman, "to return to you and every
member of the Faculty my sincere thanks for the kind
attention I have received from you and them, and if I
ever did feel unfriendly to any one member of your respectable
body, reflection, and that magnanimity of soul
which I hope I possess, has done away that feeling, and
I have a hope that it is reciprocated."

In spite of Spotswood's constant violation of the ordinances,
and disposition to quarrelsomeness, the Faculty
decided to extend his lease until July 29, six months
longer. In this interval, he continued to show the habits
which had previously exposed him to censure. His mind,
however, seemed to dwell only on his own supposititious
wrongs,—he complained, that, when he accepted the position
of hotel-keeper, he had in his possession a capital
of three thousand dollars, and that now he was thirteen
hundred dollars in debt; that the rise of water in his
cellar had caused fever in his house, which had carried
off three of his servants; and that he had been knocked
about by so many insults that he could scarcely bottle up
his indignation when he recalled them. "I deserved
them," he added, bitterly, "for not at first taking in
my own hands the punishment!" Such were the belligerent
emotions with which Spotswood's flurried career as
a University hotel-keeper terminated!

John D. Richeson, like Spotswood, sought the office
for sake of the opportunity which it offered of educating
his sons. He too could not resist the temptation of playing
cards and drinking deep with the students, although
he loudly asserted that the card-playing was confined to

innocent whist, and that the entire amount of ardent
spirits which he had consumed could, to a nicety, be
incompassed in an ordinary quart. Richeson was the
son of a Revolutionary soldier, and he seemed to think
that, on this account, he had that permanent claim on the
position which he would, as the son of a veteran, have
possessed, had it been a purely political office. In December,
1827, when the number of students was not great
enough to justify the retention of all the hotel-keepers,
there was a resolution before the Faculty that Richeson
should be one of the three to be dismissed. When he
was informed of the intention to get rid of him, his
patriotic blood seemed to boil over with indignation.
"Was it for this," he exclaimed in a letter to Cocke,
"that my father, Colonel Holt Richeson, expended his
fortune and toiled so hard all through the Revolutionary
War? Was it for this, that, besides being in many
other hard-fought battles, he had his horse shot dead
under him at the Battle of Brandywine, when he was
almost in the very ranks of the enemy, and made his
escape without being taken prisoner, with his pistols in
his hand? Was it for this that he was at the capture of
Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781? Was it for this
that he pledged his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor,
to obtain that liberty we are now enjoying? Was it for
this that he was a volunteer at Braddock's defeat in 1754,
when he was but seventeen or eighteen years of age?"

Cocke, sitting in his library at Bremo, must have found
the reading of this letter a delightful morsel to his sense
of the ridiculous; but he was sufficiently versed in character
to know that Richeson was not the first man who
had endeavored to bolster up his own deficiencies, official
or personal, by a pathetic or stirring appeal to the military
achievements of his ancestors. The Faculty very

properly decided that there was no real connection between
the battles of Brandywine and Yorktown and the
management of a University hotel, for Richeson lost his
place. After leaving the precincts, he opened a school at
Rose Hill, near Charlottesville, and on Nicholas P.
Trist's resignation of the secretaryship of the Board of
Visitors, he was an unsuccessful applicant for that position.
By 1831, his family had fallen into a state of extreme
destitution, and many of the professors generously
subscribed for its relief.

Edwin Conway, like Spotswood and Richeson, was of
a jovial temper, and as early as 1826 was accused of
playing cards and drinking with the students in their
dormitories. Loo was now the favorite game throughout
the term, while the eggnog party was the popular
entertainment in December. The genial face of Conway
was often seen shining in the midst of these jolly gatherings,
but, by the supple exercise of shrewdness, he managed
to escape the forfeit of his lease. He was still in
possession of his boarding-house as late as 1837, although,
during that year, to evade the consequences of
two protracted sprees, he was forced to join the Temperance
Society,—an extraordinary hardship to the hotel-keeper.
It was noticed by the suspicious eyes of the
Faculty that his period of abstemiousness was not to be
indefinite, but was to end on the fourth of July, with the
close of the academic year.

In the opinion of Cocke, a cool and discriminating
judge of men, with a dry, sarcastic insight into their infirmities,
Warner Minor, "was the only man of the
whole set of the right character for the station." He
alone of all the hotel-keepers was reserved in disposition,
and being a man of quiet domestic tastes, found
no pleasure in participating in the gambling and drinking

bouts of the students. But he was disliked personally.
In 1828, at least nine young men declined to matriculate
because they would be assigned to his hotel. They criticized
his table, his linen, and his servants. All declared
that he was disagreeable in his manners; and one spoke
feelingly of his "closeness." Minor would have been
more popular, perhaps, had he been inclined to play loo,
drink juleps, and loan money to his boarders. He was
careful in his business, and his reputation for parsimony
was probably based on foundations not more solid than
his laudable endeavor to make both ends meet in the management
of his house,—a strenuous and perplexing task,
as we shall see.

However great may have been Minor's deficiency in
joviality, it was supplied to a surfeit by John Gray, who
leased the hotel situated at the southwest end of West
Range. Gray had married the sister of Arthur S.
Brockenbrough, the proctor, who was a member of an
old and distinguished family. When he obtained the
lease, he had a large family of children; but this did not
deter him from plunging even deeper than Spotswood
and Richeson into the merry dissipations of the students,
and contemning the ordinances which he had sworn to
observe. By his conduct, he forfeited his lease in December,
1826. "My heart is full to overflowing," he wrote
Lomax in a lachrymose strain on the 18th of that month,
"but for myself I would ask nothing; but for my wife
and seven children, I must implore your utmost exertions
to have us reinstated." As Lomax was the father
of nine boys and girls, this appeal must have touched his
sensibilities in a very tender spot, although he had already
gone so far as to say that Gray had been guilty of "immoralities,"
by which he meant only drinking and card-playing.
Mrs. Gray herself, writing to Madison, in

1827, sadly complained that her husband had "always
been unfortunate in his progress through life"; and that
the "small remaining portion of his property would soon
be sold for the benefit of his creditors."

It had been the Visitors' policy up to this time to appoint
no woman to the position of hotel-keeper, as it
would be impossible for any one of that sex to inspect the
dormitories in person, or to serve as the proctor's assistant
in the enforcement of the police regulations. But
Mrs. Gray had so many strong claims to special consideration
that, when her husband's rights were forfeited,
John Carter was permitted to lease the vacated hotel
nominally, and then practically to sublease it to her. She
continued to be what she had previously been,—the
most vigorous personality in the circle of the hotel-keepers.
She was described by Leiper Patterson, son of Dr.
R. M. Patterson, who accompanied his father to the
University, as "an elegant and aristocratic lady, who
always wore a white turban after the fashion of the
famous Dolly Madison." A student, testifying about an
altercation that had taken place between her and one of
her boarders, affirmed that "she had returned fully as
much as she had received."[27] This was her character,—
she was prompt, resolute and outspoken. Her husband,
after seeking employment as a book agent, in the North,
finally removed to Florida; and during his residence there
visited his wife and children in Virginia only at long intervals.

S. B. Chapman, the last of the six original hotel-keepers,
did not offend as often as most of his associates
by furtive indulgences in the rooms of the students; but

he was very hospitable in his own hotel; and on one occasion
at least, was summoned before the Faculty for violating
the terms of his lease by setting strong waters
before his guests. He frankly admitted that he had
"introduced wine and brandy, but not until some of
his company had asked for it." "Finding that the students
made too free with it," he said, "he prudently put
it up."

When Spotswood's lease expired in July, 1829, he was
succeeded by J. N. Rose, who would have taken the post
the previous December, had he then been able to obtain
the funds for the purchase of the indispensable outfit for
the dormitories. Although a member of a wealthy
family residing in Nelson and Amherst counties, he had
been reduced to the point of applying for the office of
toll collector on the James River and Kanawha Canal,
and had even failed to secure this. When he resigned
in 1834, the two candidates for his berth were Captain
Daniel Perrow, who had been the proprietor of the
tavern in Rockfish Gap, and Colonel Ward, who was the
popular landlord of a hotel in Charlottesville. Their
military titles were more probably conferred in a spirit
of courtesy by genial guests than won by arduous services
even in the militia. It shows the weight given to
deportment in selecting an incumbent for the position
that the proctor, in writing to Cocke, thought it necessary
to say that "Colonel Ward had more dignity of
person and manner than his competitor." "Captain
Perrow, however," he added, "is wholly free from pecuniary
embarrassment, whilst Colonel Ward is involved."
The Board wisely preferred solvency to dignity, and
Perrow was appointed; but he lost the place in July,
1835. Ward apparently succeeded him. During several
years, Wertenbaker leased one of the hotels.