Plumb-good history

By Theresa Curry/Media General News Service
Published: November 25, 2008

It’s easy to see how rich, privileged or historically significant Virginians lived. Many of their estates are preserved, their outbuildings restored; their letters saved, their journals protected from decay. More difficult to capture, but just as compelling, is the life of a man who tended hogs, hid from Yankees in his basement and used his wardrobe door to tally the sale of his chickens.

Such a man was Alfred Edward Plumb, a man with small feet and a long beard, who lived in his family home on Main Street after his mother died. Alfred’s father (also Alfred) was a tavern keeper who became an American citizen shortly before he died. His grandfather Francis, the original Plumb immigrant, was an engraver from rural England.

Civil War stories from the point of view of ordinary citizens are poignant, and the Plumb family did a good job of preserving some of the day-to-day history, the things experienced on a personal level. Some of the stories are told by the house itself; by the doors that still hold Alfred’s informal chicken ledger, by the huge bullets lodged in the thick door of the “new” kitchen, by an oyster shell button discovered in the dirt outside. Others were remembered and repeated by the family – first Alfred’s parents, then the children he had with his wife, Mary Riddle – who kept the modest home for 155 years of the house’s two centuries. When Alfred and Mary found themselves in the midst of the Battle of Waynesboro, the house took on additional historical significance. The Plumb family offered their long-time home to the city of Waynesboro, and it is a Virginia Historic Landmark and on the National Registry of Historic Places.

When both sides of the war opened fire with them in the middle, Alfred and Mary Plumb fled to the basement – a wise move, it turns out, since the roof crumbled in the violent exchange, and a cannon ball came right down the chimney. Mary tore her dress, a tragedy in a time when cotton was almost impossible to find. Family legends recall that Mary said she would have rather hurt herself than that irreplaceable dress. Both survived, but Alfred’s brother, Henry, was not so lucky. He was killed in Manassas a few years earlier and never returned to his Waynesboro home.

An unspoken but well-understood code of honor assumed that the good women of the time would nurse any soldier, enemy or compatriot, who was hurt. Mary assumed the care of a dying Union soldier left behind. A couple of friends stayed with him, singing and keeping watch as she tended to him through the night. By dawn he was dead.

A hungry soldier passing through snatched a cake right out of the pan Mary cooked it in, but later she found a sack of flour left in its place.

Bravely, Mary predicted that she would feed Confederate soldiers soon as they liberated the town, but her unwanted guests delivered the news that Stonewall Jackson was dead and the war was effectively over. Five weeks later, the surrender was made official at Appomattox. Meanwhile, the family knew of at least one Confederate soldier on the Plumb House grounds – hiding from the Yankees by day on a ledge in the rock well and crawling out under cover of darkness to hide in the attic where he always found food. His metal mess kit was discovered years later.

The battle itself was staged during a time when there were few men left to defend Waynesboro, and each year near its anniversary there’s a reenactment. The ragtag Southern forces – less than a 10th of the manpower from the North – had no way to hold their position and fled after a few minutes. Most were captured, although the officers escaped across the South River.

Once they replaced the roof and chimney and patched up the bullet holes, Alfred and Mary went on with their lives. Alfred expanded his hog business, and family lore says he loved jokes, including throwing his dentures on the floor. They had seven children, all of whom were raised in the house on Main Street. Surely, if we knew where to look, we’d find out something about all of them, including little Henry, who died at the age of 1. Some of those children are well remembered. Like Charles, a mail carrier who moved across the street but ate every one of his 81 Christmas dinners in his childhood home; or Willie, his sister, who made many of those dinners, oversaw the flower beds and refused to use indoor plumbing until she was too old to walk to the outhouse. The final Plumb in this home was Happy, Charles’ son, whom Willie helped raise. Happy studied nature and history and filled the home and outbuildings with butterflies and arrowheads.

Every era in the life of small-town America is found somewhere in the Plumb House. Additions moved the kitchen indoors; the rich ground under the hog parlors became the Waynesboro High School track; plumbing arrived in the form of a single spigot in the yard; electricity required massive drilling through the original logs. But because of the home’s position in a short, intense battle on March 2, 1865, Shirley Bridgeforth, president of the board of the Waynesboro Heritage Foundation, says visitors are most interested in the Civil War years. The home is slowly being restored to its post-Civil War time period. The Foundation manages both this home and the Waynesboro Heritage Museum, a short distance from the Plumb House on Main Street.

Like all of us, the Plumbs were ordinary people living through extraordinary times with courage, humor and love. Other stories and glimpses of their life and the lives of other people persevering through the challenges of history are evident in the clothing, quilts, artifacts and photos collected in this touching tribute to real life in a Shenandoah Valley river town.

The Plumb House is open from 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Thursday through Saturday.

Theresa Curry is a staff writer for the Daily Progress in Charlottesville .