University of Virginia Library

5. FIFTH INSTALLMENT.

The benefit to be derived from a college of Virginia
fiddlers was at the outset the subject of not a little fun.

“Adams,” it was said, “has got so much money he
don't know what to do with it. The thing will soon
play out and be forgotten, or remembered only as another
instance of the foolishness of rich men. The money
is his own, though, and if he chooses to throw it away in
that manner it is his own lookout. Pity he hasn't sense
enough to devote it to some charitable object.”

What is commonly known as charity found little favor
in my eyes, and as for the objections made by the wise
men of that day, they had been foreseen and provided
for long before the college was founded.

Unbelievers were cured in this way:

After the college had been in operation for a sufficient
time to perfect the professors, as well as the students, in
the true Virginia sling of the bow, I caused tickets of invitation
to the commencement exercises to be sent to a

number of Northern belles, who never in their lives had
danced anything but the so-called round dances,—waltzes,
polkas, mazourkas, etc. They attended (their expenses
being paid, indeed, every outlay incident to the commencement
was defrayed out of the ample endowment),
the novelty of the affair attracting them; but before they
returned home the fire, the life, the inspiration imparted
to them by real dancing, and by such fiddling as they
had never dreamed of, carried them completely away
with enthusiasm, so much so that they went back to their
Northern homes only to order Virginia fiddlers whenever
they could get them, and to introduce Virginia dancing
in all of the great cities. How popular that dancing and
the fiddling which inspires it, and without which it could
not exist, has become throughout the Empire, no one
need now be told. True, the lovers of pure hugging still
insist upon having their persons grappled and tousled by
any two-legged animal in trousers they can find, but the
better classes, who can be merry and at the same time
decent, much prefer the style disseminated by the Curdsville
College. And this I consider a great and permanent
blessing to mankind.

Subsidiary to the regular Curdsville curriculum was a
course on the fife, the proper playing of which I vainly
sought to revive. Never was there a more complete
failure. After a few years of earnest toil, fife-playing
was dropped and never resumed. The truth is, the art
of performing on the fife died with Blind Billy. I never
knew a man but Billy who could do justice to the fife—a
glorious instrument (not for military, but for terpsichorean
purposes) in the hands of a man of genius. Such
a man was Billy. I wish I knew his history.

If I failed signally in the matter of the fife, my success
in the course which I substituted in place of it was equally
signal. So early as 1870, the old original tune played on
the long tin-horn previous to the tobacco breaks in
Lynchburg had become garbled. It could readily be
recognized as a sickly and adumbrated simulacrum of its
grand original (tobacco men never failing to respond to
its summons), but it had lost much of that wild, weird,
and deadly unearthliness which characterized it from

1820 to 1830, and even later than that. It is, in my
deliberate judgment, the most ghastly and appalling
chant that ever emanated from the musical imagination.
The name of its composer is lost in the night of oblivion.
My opinion is that it is not the work of any one man,
not a single composition struck off in the heat of inspiration,
but is more likely a growth and the product of
many minds. Be that as it may, in 1870, the decadence
of Ethiopian life and art, which followed the liberation
of our Virginia slaves, was most painfully marked in the
change that had taken place in this astonishing old tune.
Previous to his departure for Georgia, Jones had often
lamented with me over this sad change, and he had often
promised to write out for me, in full, the notes of the
tune as it was blown in its prime.[1] The establishment of
the Curdsville Fiddlers' College enabled Jones and myself
to rescue this tune (far more peculiar and saddening
in its effects than the famous Miserere of the Sistine
Chapel), and to restore it to its pristine completeness.
Jones not only wrote out the music, but, leaving his work
on the park and reservoir, came down in person to Curdsville,
bringing with him a tobacco-horn blower from
Planter's or Martin's warehouse, and stayed with him
until he was thoroughly enough versed in the tune to
teach it. His class was small. Few cared to devote
themselves assiduously to the study of the horn. Hearing
of this, I immediately instituted a Horn Prize of one
hundred dollars in gold, which soon brought an ample
supply of aspirants, and I have now the satisfaction of
knowing that so long as the world stands and tobacco is
sold in Lynchburg, it will be sold to the sound of the
most mournful and remarkable combination of notes ever
framed by the human mind.

My object in buying the Buckingham Female Institute
was not merely to save it from the utter destruction which
seemed to await it, but to establish there another Fiddlers'
College for white men exclusively. But remembering that

the practice of Virginia fiddling, beneficial and, indeed,
ennobling to the black man, has a tendency to encourage
dissipation in the white man, I abandoned the original
plan and consecrated the Institute wholly to the instruction
of able-bodied young men in the ancient and manly
games of “Chermany” and “Ant'ny Over.” The etymology
of the former game is obscure. It may have been
“Germany,” though I have never known a Dutchman to
play it or even to be aware of its rules and regulations.
My aim was to supplant the vile pastimes of base-ball and
billiards which befell the Commonwealth as a part of the
loathsome legacy bequeathed us by the war. I could not,
indeed, believe that these debilitating and abnormal sports
would perpetually exclude the time-honored and patriotic
games to which Virginians had been accustomed, but my
fear was that after the base-ball business the awful thing
called cricket might follow, and that I could not have
borne. Those silly wickets and those absurd bats are to
my mind execrable, inexcusable, and unfounded upon
reason and common sense.

I am happy to say that the wholesome streams poured
forth from the pellucid fountain of Virginian sports at the
Buckingham Institute permeated and percolated the Commonwealth
until base-ball disappeared entirely, and billiards
were relegated to the largest cities, where they will
forever divide the honors with bagatelle, which I take to
be the last resource of manikins.

My feelings toward Farmville and the whole region
thence along the old stage road, and the railroad too, up
to Lynchburg, were of the warmest character. A portion
of Cumberland also was dear to me. There was nothing
I would not have done for Cartersville, for Oak Grove
(formerly called Walton's Store when I went to school
there, some seventy-odd years ago, to Mr. Burns), for
Tarwallet Church, Cumberland Court-House, for Langhorne's
Tavern, Ça Ira, Hard Bargain (Mr. Page taught
me, and I had the itch there), for Raine's Tavern, the
New Store, the wild region once called Algiers, for
Walker's Store (my father and I once stayed all night
there with old Mr. McDearmon), for Prince Edward
Court-House (to turn back a little, where Mr. Ballantyne

taught me, and I learned to shoot the horse-pistol), for
Appomattox Church, near which I spent in boyhood many
happy days at Dr. Merritt Allen's, for Pamplin's Depot,
for the other Raine's Tavern, which subsequently became
Appomattox Court-House, for the Spout Spring, for Concord,
and every foot of the way thence to Lynchburg.
There was nothing, I say, that I would not have done for
these places and others I could name,—for example, the
Red House Tavern, in Charlotte. Indeed, I wanted to
do something for the first lock below Lynchburg, for Bent
Creek and Warminster, so affectionate was my remembrance
of them all, but many were past doing for, and
others needed little of my assistance; as, for instance,
Farmville, which prospered greatly after the lunatic asylum
and the Mercury were started there. All I could do for
Farmville was to buy the place called Mountain View,
which my uncle, Mr. James Evans, rented for a number
of years, and erect upon it a foundation for the everlasting
education of real old Virginia cooks, so that as long
as the human jaw continued to work in the Virginia
countenance, ash-cake, good loaf-bread, fried chicken,
and a thousand other delicacies known only to Virginians
should exist for said jaw to play upon. It furnishes me
infinite happiness to be able to state what is well known
to all the enlightened natives, that the Evans foundation
secured forever to Virginians the cooking and the food
without which they would long since have ceased to exist;
and not only that, but that from this invaluable institution
(which I designed as a nursery for Virginia cooks, partly
of both sexes, but mostly fat females) there went forth so
large a supply of cooks that I was enabled within twenty
years to establish in all the principal cities of the world
Virginia taverns, where a man could eat an old-fashioned
dinner of every variety of Virginia meat, vegetables, and
dessert, including pan-cakes and fritters, and afterwards
retire to a real old Virginia room with an open fire of
hickory or pine, as he might prefer (or with fennel in the
fire-place in summer-time), and smoke Virginia tobacco
in a Virginia pipe as he leaned back in a split-bottom
chair and cocked his feet on an Old Virginia mantel-piece,
duly ornamented with an oblong gilt mirror, divided into
three compartments, flanked by tall silver candlesticks (a
candle-stand being in readiness for them when desired),
and surmounted with a picture of General Washington
crossing the Delaware, or commanding at Monmouth.

I do believe that these Virginia taverns have done the
world a great deal of good. An archæological interest
attaches to them. They carry forward into the new times
the very life and custom of a remote and glorious past,
for they present in addition to the furniture of a former era
(for which those who are the least curious about the customs
of their ancestors have always the liveliest fondness)
the actual food and the manner of cooking it which obtained
in the days long gone by, and in that way they
afford the historian precisely that information which in
regard to ages still more remote, fancifully called prehistoric
or stone ages, is left almost entirely to conjecture.
Nor must I omit to notice the remarkable circumstance
that, notwithstanding the changes which are continually
taking place in the human constitution, unfitting it in
general for the diet of previous times, the Virginia eating
has proved, after long trial, to be suited to all times and
to all modifications of the system. It is now admitted
by the best physiologists that Virginia ash-cake, streaked
middling, etc., will probably be as welcome and as wholesome
to the last men who inhabit this planet as it was to
Buck Farrar, of Farmville, in 1811.

[It was an immense relief to me when I learned that
Hampden Sydney College had raised three hundred thousand
dollars, and that a sum still larger had been obtained
for the Union Theological Seminary. Long experience
had taught me that only very rich Yankee men can do much
for colleges (Southern men being fine promisers but poor
payers), and I had so much to do and so little to do it with.
I thought it hard, too, that I had to build the perfect MacAdam
road (the only one in the State) from Farmville to
the college, with shade-trees and sidewalks all the way—
hard, because I believed that the professors on College Hill
maintained a bad dirt-road because they did not want outsiders
to obtrude into that delightful little Republic of
Letters. But I built the road for my own sake, and cannot
say I am sorry I did build it, though I now think it ought

to have been a plank-road, for the benefit of Evans's saw-mill
and other saw-mills that needed employment.

Everybody said I ought to have built a narrow-gauge
railroad instead of a MacAdam road. I could not so think.
At that day there was a mania on the subject of narrow-,
as at an earlier day there had been a mania about broad-gauge
roads, but now no one doubts that many even of
the latter ought not to have been built until the country
became more thickly settled. The same amount of money
spent in first-class turnpikes would have been productive
of much more good, and given much more comfort to
country people. As soon as Virginia became an integral
part of the Empire, a moiety only of the former taxation
being applied to the improvement of country roads made
the land habitable, and then, for the first time, immigrants
ceased to alight for a moment and depart the next, like so
many wild pigeons.]

I might, if space permitted, dwell at some length on
this important subject, but must hurry on to Richmond,
saying only in passing that little favors, such as drinking-fountains,
equestrian statues, etc., were distributed freely
to Warminster, and other places heretofore named, the
particulars of which I do not recall, my memory being at
fault, not so much because of age as on account of the
multitude of things done in various hamlets and cross-roads
which were dear to me.

[Here it will be in place to say that the drinking-fountains
were not whisky-fountains. This is a specimen
slander of the thousands gotten up against me by the
newspapers. The thing is absurd on its very face; for I
suppose there is not a man in the world, a man rich
enough, to furnish free whisky to the places named above
even if they had desired it, which they did not, the love
of it having departed from them.

As to the accusation that my taste president over that
parody of the Bunker Hill monument, at Burkeville, that,
too, is a vile slander. I did furnish the money to build
there a shot-tower two hundred feet high, and requested
its shape should be that of the Eddystone light-house.
But the contractor, a violent Southern man, would make
it like the monument in question, painted it black and

varnished it. As a shot-tower it was not a success, though
Mr. Hennipinkle, a worthy German, managed it economically.
I had a suit about it with the contractor, but was,
of course, cast on account of my supposed wealth.

It was cut up into stories of ten feet each, the first of
which was a bar-room, the second a tank, the third a job
office, the fourth an editor's room, the fifth a sumac mill,
and the rest were rented out as lodging-rooms for artists
and poets who came to spend the summer and study the
scenery. In that way it paid very well. On the top was
a huge lantern, illuminated by calcium lights, which
proved useful to the railroads at night, especially after the
tracks were doubled. The great black tower looming up
two hundred feet in air, and flaming like a small sun,
made the night.approach to Burkeville singularly fine and
novel.

The superb mosque built by me not far from the town
as a dancing-hall for the good people of the vicinage, was
much admired, but was burnt by a fanatical dervish, who
came through the James River and Kanawha Canal on the
first packet-boat that traversed its waters after its completion
to the Ohio—a sad end to so pretty and enjoyable
an edifice. I could not rebuild it, being in reduced circumstances.]