Civil War Widows Home Trivia

This is a trivia question about a home for civil war veterans' widows.  Until I saw this building I didn't even know these existed, though I obviously should have.  Really makes me wonder about the literature on homes for veterans' widows and how they fit into the landscape of classical liberalism and private charity in the late 19th and early 20th century.  I bet there's a great story here, if it hasn't already been written.

Where is it and what is it used for now?

Update: I now see that the University of Virginia library has extensive papers from the home -- and that there was a lawsuit filed back in 1989 by a ninety-eight year old resident when the state wanted to close the home down and move the remaining residents (I guess they were all daughters of Confederate Veterans) to a nursing home out in Chesterfield County.  Why didn't I know about this already?  Seems like it would be a nice companion to Hermitage Methodist Homes.  Perhaps I'll have a chance to go through some of these papers this summer when I'm up in Charlottesville to go through the antebellum masters theses....

And there were a bunch of Confederate widows homes, including one that was in Fayetteville and another in Charleston.  So perhaps I have a new topic for photographs.

Here is a close-up of the entrance, with the "Home for Confederate Women" and the Confederate Seal (with the Richmond Washington Equine Statue on it) above the doors.  Also, there was a protest against the removal of the Confederate flag from the VMFA grounds going on the day I was in Richmond.

Comments

[Glomarization, Esq.]

It's the "Home for Needy Confederate Women" in Richmond. Now it's part of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

[Alfred L. Brophy]

Glormarization -- darn you're good. You got that exactly right. Nicely done; I figured this was going to be absurdly difficult. Sometime soon I want to put up a picture of the entrance, which has the name inscribed in stone. Also I want to put up some pictures of the neo-Confederate protesters at the VMFA this weekend. They're angry that the VMFA won't let them fly a Confederate flag at the chapel on the VMFA grounds (which used to be a home for Confederate veterans). Things have changed a *lot* in Richmond over the past century.

[Glomarization, Esq.]

Thanks.

I think there's an interesting tension between on the one hand admiration for providing for the widows and children (presumably girls), who would have lost their breadwinners in an era when there were few options for them to provide for themselves, and on the other hand the disgust at the cause their breadwinners lost their lives for. Cynically, were the homes truly set up in good faith, or were they at least in part PR moves to demonstrate the gallantry of those who fought for "[their] peculiar institution"?

> angry that the VMFA won't let them
> fly a Confederate flag [...] Things
> have changed a *lot* in Richmond over
> the past century

Are you sure those two sentences support each other? :)

I spent my early years in Chesterfield County (and retain a couple of habits in pronunciation to this day). One summer when I was a small child, my mother would take my sister and me to a YMCA to play in the pool. After a few visits she noted that the other mothers wouldn't talk to her, and the other children weren't permitted to hang with me and my sister. She spoke to the pool manager, who told her, "Well, they think you're Jewish." My mother took her Mediterranean self and her children and found another facility the very next day; and when I was older, I would think, "Would they really have treated us better if they'd known we were, in fact, Catholic?"

I imagine the odds are slim to none that some of those same Stars and Bars-wavers were at that pool when I was a kid in the 1970s. But I tell you, while I'm likely stuck with my accent for the rest of my life, you could never entice me to move back south of the Mason-Dixon line while I'm still compos mentis.

[Alfred L. Brophy]

Glormarization -- lots to talk about there. Those are quite some stories of life in the Richmond suburbs in the 1970s.

I'm always astonished at how much the world has changed since the early 1960s. Many of the changes were well under-way when I worked in Richmond in 1990-91 (Croson was then a recent precedent.) One sign of the changes: the Virginia attorney general refuses to support the state's ban on same-sex marriage.

I hung around a little to watch the protest. They all looked middle aged. The younger crowd's focused on other issues, I should imagine, to care about this. Two other data points -- first, they had a huge sign that said something like honk if you love the Confederate flag. No one did while I was there. Also, there was a counter-protester.