I'm teaching Hermitage Methodist Homes of Virginia, 387 S.E.2d 740 (Va. 1990), later today in property. That deals with a bequest by Powell Hill "Jack"Adams to a series of educational institutions, beginning with the Prince Edward County School Foundation and running through Hampden-Sydney College. The Methodist Homes of Virginia (a retirement community) was the residual beneficiary. The bequest was defeasible whenever the educational institutions admitted African American students. Unsurprisingly, there were no racial conditions attached to the residual beneficiary (Hermitage Method Homes).
I thought that I'd use this as an excuse to talk about the case, post a picture of Hampden-Sydney, and also to talk a little bit about Prince Edward County, where the college is located. The testator left property in trust, first to Prince Edward County Schools -- which I take it was set up in response to PE County's closure of the public schools to avoid integration. Those guys meant business, I guess. But because the testator obviously envisioned that there might be a time when even the Foundation might admit non-white people, there were three alternative beneficiaries -- the Miller School, and then the Seven Hills School in Lynchburg, and Hampden-Sydney College (which were also dependent on those schools educating only white people) and then the final beneficiary was the Hermitage Methodist Homes of Virginia. In 1987 the trustee filed suit against the income beneficiaries because the "determinable event" (that is the education of non-white students) had taken place. The upshot here is that the Virginia Court of Appeals upheld the defeasible condition and had the property go to the final beneficiary -- not entirely surprising as a result.
But what interests me greatly are two things -- first about Prince Edward County. That is a place where there were a lot of different traditions in operation. While it is best known now as a place where massive resistance made a serious stand, in the years before Civil War it is the place where some of John Randolphs former slaves made their home and carved out an existence as freed people. Melvin Ely's brilliant, expansive, and beautifully written Israel on the Appomattox tells the story of that community, largely from court and probate records. I'm very interested in how Ely is able to tell this optimistic story of an independent and successful African American community that is just a few counties over from Southampton in the years around the Nat Turner rebellion. It's testimony to how many different worlds exited in antebellum Virginia. At some point I hope to write in some depth about this. Second -- and perhaps not entirely unrelated -- at some points in its existence Hampden-Sydney College was educating anti-slavery thinkers. Jesse Harrison, who debated rather unsuccessfully William and Mary's Thomas R. Dew, was educated there. So was William Brodnax, who delivered a literary address at Hampden-Sydney around 1812 that was quite critical of Spanish colonialism and had a sympathic view of Native Americans. Later in the antebellum era things were rather different on that campus. Faculty like George Baxter were teaching proslavery doctrine. The sine curve of ideas in Prince Edward County and at Hampden-Sydney is a story I hope to tell in some more depth shortly.
You might be interested in this clip from 1960, which is an interview of the administrator of the Prince Edward County Foundation. (The link is now, I hope, fixed.)
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