, / rV6iA- Wail') (Ina IL'iCv J A COLLEGE BEFRIENDED: William and Mary in 1887 edited by PARKE ROUSE, JR.* THE decline of Williamsburg, which began after Virginia's seat of govern- ment moved to Richmond in 1780, reached its lowest level after the Civil War. In July of 1882 the war-battered College of William and Mary—the nation's second oldest college and Williamsburg's chief remaining distinction —was forced to close for lack of students. The college's board of visitors announced that the closing was temporary, designed to give the bankrupt school time to raise funds and repair its campus. Though it had been en- dowed originally by the British crown in 1693 and had been administered until the Revolution by the Church of England, the college since then had had to depend on its own slender resources. The Civil War had exhausted these. The closing especially disappointed William and Mary's president, the seventy-two-year-old Benjamin Stoddert Ewell, who had interrupted his long service to the college to serve as a lieutenant colonel in Confederate forces under his West Point schoolmate, General Joseph E. Johnston. In 1883, attempting to reopen the college, Ewell had recommended to his board of visitors that they ask the General Assembly to make the college a normal school to train teachers for Virginia's post—Civil War public schools. Nothing came of Ewell's proposal until the 1887-88 session of the General Assembly, which passed an act in March 1888 establishing the normal school. In that session, young Delegate Lyon Gardiner Tyler of Richmond successfully led an effort to subsidize the college with $10,000 annually to train teachers, thus enabling the college to reopen in October 1888. President Ewell had retired in May 1888, to remain president emeritus until his death in June 1894. Lyon Gardiner Tyler, a son of John Tyler, left his Richmond law practice and Assembly seat to succeed Ewell as William and Mary's president. While William and Mary was closed, Ewell kept an office in the Presi- dent's House in the college yard, where he looked after college affairs and * Parke Rouse, Jr., is the retired director of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation. Among his books are A House for a President: 250 years on the campus of the College of William and Mary (Richmond, 1983). He expresses gratitude to Mrs. Mary Mordecai Goodwin for her generous assistance with this article. THE VIRGINIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY Vol. 94 No. 1 (January 1986) 78 The Virginia Magazine properties. As he had been doing ever since the Civil War's end, he wrote letters for funds to revive the school. From Congress he sought $64,000, which the college estimated to be the cost of repairing its main building (now the Wren Building), which had been wantonly burned by intoxicated Union soldiers in 1862 after the town had been occupied by General George B. McClellan's forces in May of that year. In addition to members of Con- gress, Ewell sought help from northern capitalists, Civil War leaders (some of whom he had known at West Point), and even from Britons whom he presumed to be interested in the college begun by the British crown. In the years 1882 to 1888, while the college slumbered, Ewell lived at his James City County farm, Ewell Hall, four miles north of the college on the Richmond stage road. There also lived his daughter Lizzie and her husband, Beverley Scott. Ewell's black servant, Malachi Gardiner, drove him to Wil- liamsburg on weekdays in a carriage and helped him at the college and at home. Ewell's young wife, the former Julia McIlvaine, had deserted him before the war to return to her home in York, Pennsylvania, not to return in his lifetime. Lizzie therefore served as her father's housekeeper and hostess. In May 1887, while the college was closed, President Ewell received a visit from Daniel Coit Gilman, president of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The university, devoted especially to research and graduate study, had been chartered in 1867 and opened in 1876. Gilman was accom- panied to Williamsburg by his wife, the former Elizabeth Dwight Woolsey of Connecticut, whom he called Lillie, and by Alice, his daughter by his first wife, the former Mary Ketcham. The three had embarked at Baltimore on 17 May, docking the next day at Old Point Comfort. From there they had come by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway's Peninsula line to Williamsburg, arriving on 20 May. They took rooms in the town's best hostelry, the City Hotel, a clapboard structure at the northeast corner of the courthouse green on Duke of Gloucester Street, where they remained two days before return- ing to Baltimore. Daniel and Elizabeth Gilman each wrote an account of the Williamsburg visit, both of which have survived. Gilman made two pages of abbreviated notes in his diary' and on his return to Baltimore also wrote Ewell his thanks for the visit and Ewell's gift of books.2 Mrs. Gilman sent a fuller account to 1 Daniel Coit Gilman, Diary, pp. 50-51, manuscript collection, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, the Johns Hopkins University (courtesy of M. C. Beecheno, special collections librarian). In this transcription, original spelling and punctuation have been retained. Expansions have been indicated with brackets. 2 Daniel Coit Gilman to Benjamin Stoddert Ewell, 28 May 1887, William and Mary Archives, Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary. A College Befriended 79 The Ferdinand Hamburger, Jr., Archives, The johns Hopkins University Daniel Coit Gilman (1831-1908), first president of the Johns Hopkins University, visited the College of William and Mary in 1887. There he found "no students: no professors: only President" Benjamin Stoddert Ewell, "the watchful and faithful guardian of a grand idea." In this family photograph, Gilman's sister Louisa is seated at the left. Seated at the right is Gilman's first wife, Mary Van Winker Ketcham. The Gilmans' older daughter Alice, who accompanied her father to Williamsburg, is in the center. 80 The Virginia Magazine her sisters in Stratford, Connecticut. Gilman noted in his diary that "Lillie's letters to her sisters,' ret[urne]d to me, have a vivid description of all this." Gilman's diary account reads thus: 1887 May 17 to Hampton—& Hort] Monroe & W[illia]msburg. arr[ive]d at Wbg. May 20—Hotel of J. B. C. Spencer.4 (Mrs. S. b[orn] Miss Peachy; c[ousin] of Miss Martin)—Peter Ash [Epps1,5 colored driver. Adams pamph[le]t6 & Steven's Yorktown guide' adequate. After driving about the town, went 4 m. N. of W[illiam] & M[ary] to call on Col. Ewell (aet. 74) Pres. W.& M.—his d[aughter] Mrs. Scott. Next day—Church, exterior vine covered picturesque: interior badly restored of late:8 font, fr[om] Jamestown. (said that Pocah[ontas] baptd. 3 Originals of Mrs. Gilman's letters have not been found, but typewritten extracts were sent by her stepdaughter, Elisabeth Gilman, to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., in a letter dated 18 Mar. 1934, now in Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Archives. I acknowledge the kindness of the foundation in permitting the use of this material and of the College of William and Mary for use of Gilman's letter. 4 J. B. C. Spencer operated the hotel, which until 1888 belonged to Bushrod W. Bowery, who advertised his City Hotel as his "New Hotel on Main Street and fronting the beautiful and historic Court Green. Large and airy. Furnished in the most modern and comfortable style. ." in the Williamsburg Gazette and James City County Advertiser (Long) for 31 Mar. 1886. In April 1888 the property passed to Spencer, who thereafter operated it as the Colonial Inn. In 1907 Spencer gave notice that he had enlarged his inn to be headquarters for tourists to the James- town Exposition, celebrating the 300th anniversary of the English landing at Jamestown. Spencer noted that the "parlors and library are filled with antiques. The dining room is large and airy. Livery connected with Hotel. Bus [horse-drawn] meets all trains. Open all year. Rates $2.50 and up. For any information desired, apply to J. B. C. Spencer, Proprietor" (from an "Illustrated Historical Sketch of Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown by J. Blair Spencer, M.D."). Spencer continued his Colonial Inn for years and in 1923 conveyed the property to W. A. Bozarth of Williamsburg. In 1929 the property was conveyed to the Williamsburg Restoration. The hotel was operated for a time as the Williamsburg Inn and was razed in 1939 to make room for the reconstruction of Chowning's Tavern, an earlier structure on the approximate site. (For information on the property, see M. A. Stephenson, Research Department, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation report on Block 19, Colonial Lot 43 [March 1954], pp. 16-22.) 5 Peter Epps was listed among black residents of Williamsburg as "cook at the Inn" in the 1898 Directory and Handbook of the City of Williamsburg.... He was a "man of many trades" at the Inn, including cook, waiter, and driver of carriages and buses. Epps's descendants live in Williams- burg today. 6 A printed account of the college, published by the Bureau of Education, entitled The College of William and Mary: A Contribution to the History of Higher Education, with Suggestions for its National Promotion. By Herbert B. Adams,... (Washington, D.C., 1887). 7 A printed guide to the Yorktown battlefield, which had been the scene in 1881 of an ob- servance of the 100th anniversary of Washington's victory over Cornwallis, attended by the presi- dent and Congress.