VACHARLO-L Archives

From: "westview" <>
Subject: Westview/HGTV
Date: Mon, 24 May 2004 12:49:43 -0400

Greetings everyone!

I've received many e-mails about our house's appearance on HGTV, many with questions. There were a couple of errors in the show, and they left out much, but all in all it was pretty good (although I'm not quite as "thrilled" and "amazed" as they would have me). In the interest of expediency, I will try to answer them here (please hit the delete button if you're not interested, and excuse the bother).

Our house, Westview, is in Charlotte County although the mailing address is Brookneal (which is in Campbell); we are about nine miles east of Brookneal. The house and grounds were placed on the National and Virginia Registers of Historic Places in February 2000.

My husband, Earl, and I purchased the house and 130 acres of the original plantation six years ago this week. After John Wesley Elam (son of the builder) died in 1917, the property passed to his wife's niece, Kathryn Nowlin Terrell. Mrs. Terrell, who lived in Texas, used Westview as a summer home until the late 1950s when she and her husband lived here year-round for a couple of years. Following his death ca. 1960, Mrs. Terrell moved to Alabama with a daughter and the house was closed up. It stayed that way until about 1975 when a series of tenants moved in. We purchased the house from Mrs. Terrell's granddaughter. The house deteriorated greatly during those years, and by the time we bought it it was in sad shape. There were huge holes in the kitchen floor, crumbling plaster, no electricity, no heat, no working kitchen, and the only bathroom was physically outside the house on a porch. The last tenant had every room crammed to the ceiling with junk, and there were li!
ve and dead mice, bees, and other wildlife in every room.

Still, we fell in love with the house and persevered. We spent the first few months with contractors all over the house putting in HVAC, electricity, a kitchen, and one and a half baths (indoor plumbing!). Once that was done, Earl and I started the long process of the physical restoration. Although in most cases totally stripping woodwork is not a good choice, we had no option -- the original paint had been coated in the mid-late19th century with multiple coats of dark brown varnish, none of which had ever dried completely. The resultant sticky mess sucked and cracked the original paint down to the wood. Over the years, many more coats of paint had been put over the varnish. The end result was a cracked, dirty, sticky mess that had to be removed. We finally finished the interior in late 2002. The focus of this particular program is artifacts -- they filmed for four hours, but only wanted a couple of the rooms. Believe me, the rest of the house is lovely. Maybe one !
day I will start a website to show the whole house.

The exterior is still not finished, especially the front. The original house had no porch; a large, Italianate porch was added in the second half of the 19th c. and removed by the last tenant who erected the small "porch" and concrete pad seen on the show. Both of those porchs left tar and cut marks on the original brick. Our attempts to remove the tar have been unsuccessful to date -- we're scheduled to try a new approach to the problem this summer. Also, I'm torn between the authenticity of not having a porch and the fact that the house would look better with one.

The painting they showed is a copy of a watercolor still owned by the family. It is a highly stylised "mourning picture" (the willow tree, urn, and plinth never existed here, they are symbols of mourning), painted about 1850, most likely by one of the Elams' three daughters. Based on my research, I believe it depicts Isabella Davis Elam Williams (middle daughter of John Elam) and her husband, Francis S. Williams, mourning a newborn infant (which would explain why there is no name on the plinth). They had no other children. The picture is unusual in that it depicts the house (with no porch!).

Although we are professional archaeologists, and despite the staging (in the pouring rain!), the majority of the artifacts we have were not excavated -- we found them in the crawlspace under the house (although we have done some excavating here). There are small ventilation holes along the base of the walls; servants would sweep the yard and toss the refuse through the holes. Our contractors were the first to bring out artifacts; since then Earl and I have gone under the house many times, each time finding more cool stuff. The wallet they showed was not found here; it came with the boxes of Elam family papers given me. John W. Elam carried it though the Civil War.

When Mrs. Terrell died in 1975 she left a trunk full of family papers dating back to the early 1800s. The papers were divided into four sacks and given to four grandchildren -- we now own three of those sacks and are working on getting the fourth. I am in the process of cataloguing and curating the papers, and am slowly posting some of the info on-line. It is a fascinating time capsule of life on a Southside Virginia plantation in the 19th century.

I think I have covered all the questions I received, if not, please e-mail me off-list. I do want to thank all the kind listers who have inquired about my health and appearance. I am slowly recovering and, although I'm still carrying too much weight, I look and feel much better than I did when they were taping.

Thanks again for watching!

Kathy Liston

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