Bucktrout Daybook and Ledger
from the Swem Library at the College of William and Mary

Bucktrout Ledger, Historical Narrative

By Carol Kettenburg Dubbs

The day after Christmas 1850, Williamsburg mayor John Maupin strolled out to his farm south of town lingered and chatted with his slaves until mid-afternoon, then announced he was going “home.” Perhaps he meant his eternal home, for instead of returning to town, he slipped into the shed room of his barn. That evening his overseer found him there, “hanging by his neck” dead. A half hour before sunrise one February 1859 morning, a free black man named Pleasant Baker crept into an old Revolutionary War graveyard on the southern edge of Williamsburg and slit his own throat with a “raisor.” One week later Williamsburg hotel keeper Benjamin Hansford committed the same act with his left hand, after first tying a handkerchief around the razor’s handle to “keep it from giving way.”1

Such were some of the more dramatic deaths detailed in the ledger and daybook of Richard Manning Bucktrout, the principal undertaker in Williamsburg during the mid-nineteenth century. More than a record of deaths and burials, this volume offers a unique perspective of day to day life in Virginia’s first historically significant city. Furthermore, the time period it covers, from 1850 through 1866, coincides with the nation’s most critical epoch, when constitutional and cultural arguments between South and North escalated into a war of secession that changed the Constitution and culture forever. A rare glimpse into Williamsburg society immediately before, during, and after this profound upheaval may be gleaned from the daily entries in Bucktrout’s ledger.

By 1850 Williamsburg was three quarters of a century removed from its glory days as the capital of England’s oldest, largest, wealthiest, and most populous colony. The city began as a settlement called Middle Plantation midway between the James and York rivers several years after the 1607 founding of Jamestown. In 1699 Virginia’s legislature decided to move the capital out of the mosquito-infested Jamestown swamps to the relatively healthier high ground of Middle Plantation five miles to the north. Renamed Williamsburg for Britain’s reigning monarch, its main thoroughfare, a meandering horse path, was graded and broadened into the ninety-foot wide Duke of Gloucester Street. The settlement already boasted a substantial brick Bruton Parish Church, rebuilt in 1715, and, at the western end of Duke of Gloucester, the massive Main Building of the College of William and Mary, chartered in 1693, was almost complete. Public buildings added over the next seventy years included a Capitol at the eastern end of Duke of Gloucester, an executive mansion dubbed the Governor’s Palace, an octagonal Powder Magazine, North America’s first Public Hospital for the mentally ill, and a courthouse erected in 1770. Numerous taverns, shops, and private houses also sprang up along Duke of Gloucester and two parallel streets named Francis to the south and Nicholson to the north, to support a swelling population estimated at two thousand. Large open greens in front of the Palace, called Palace Green, and in the middle of town surrounding the courthouse and magazine--variously designated Market Square or Courthouse Green--provided space for militia musters, slave auctions, produce markets, and recreation.2

When the thirteen colonies declared their independence from Great Britain in 1776, Williamsburg became the capital of the Union’s largest and wealthiest state, but only until 1780. At that time the state government decided to remove to the relatively healthier high ground of Richmond fifty miles to the northwest. The following year the Governor’s Palace burned to the ground, and within the next few decades the Capitol met a similar fate. Williamsburg soon devolved into a sleepy little college town; a market center servicing the lush, rolling farmland and forests in the surrounding York and James City counties; and a court town for all Williamsburg and James City County courts. The Public Hospital flourished into the Eastern Lunatic Asylum. Travelers passing through during the nineteenth century often remarked on Williamsburg’s charming antiquity, due no doubt to few structures being erected after the colonial period. With so large a part of the population accompanying the capital to Richmond, no new houses were needed, and only the wealthier stay-behinds could afford to embellish their old homes with modern facades.3

Among those remaining in Williamsburg after 1780 was master cabinetmaker Benjamin Bucktrout. His name first appeared in Williamsburg in a July 1766 Virginia Gazette advertisement announcing his availability to make “all sorts of Cabinet work, either plain or ornamental, in the neatest and newest fashions.” Though the ad stated he came from London, Benjamin was likely a native of Otly, Yorkshire, England, where Bucktrouts still reside and where the legendary furniture maker Chippendale was born. Bucktrout also made and repaired spinets and harpsichords, and his skill is attested by an ornate master’s chair he built for the Williamsburg Masonic Lodge, the only locally made and signed piece of furniture in the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation collection.4

By 1768 Bucktrout had married the widow Mary Martin. Over the next few years he expanded his business to include merchandizing and was elected captain of the local militia company. Bucktrout sided with his adopted country during the Revolutionary War, providing the American army with guns and sundries and supplying the Public Hospital as purveyor. He also made coffins, a natural sideline for a cabinetmaker. At the war’s end in 1781, Bucktrout was apparently serving in Williamsburg’s town council called the Common Hall. A childless widower and near three score years old in 1797, he began courting young Miss Mary Bruce. “He is turn’d out quite a beau,” one much amused neighbor gossiped, “scarlet waistcoat and his neat wig in a stiff single curl round and mounted on good horse with a servant riding behind him on a good one also, following a chair in which the damsel was going out of Town.” Benjamin’s courtship succeeded, and his second Mary quickly produced four children: Rachel, Horatio Nelson, Benjamin Earnshaw, and finally, in 1805, Richard Manning.5

The same year his son Benjamin was born, 1803, father Benjamin was commissioned by Williamsburg to draw a city map, perhaps his most enduring contribution to the town. On it he carefully numbered the city lots and identified each owner, labeled every street indicating its width, and sketched illustrations of the public buildings. At that time Bucktrout owned two adjacent lots at the eastern end of Francis Street, more informally called South Back Street. He had acquired these lots shortly before his second marriage and bequeathed them, along with six more lots he had bought just south of them, to his widow upon his death in 1812. The Bucktrout family home stood on the eastern lot on Francis Street, and the western lot contained “a long, tall frame building,” used by the Methodists as their first house of worship in Williamsburg. Stables, kitchen and buttery, and other outbuildings stood behind the house, with formal gardens, vegetable gardens, and an apple orchard “extending down to the woods known as the old Revolutionary burying ground,” according to family tradition. French soldiers who perished fighting for American independence are buried in that wooded graveyard, along with paupers and most likely executed criminals not welcome in Bruton Parish’s churchyard. Another lot across Francis Street and bordering Capitol Square also bore Bucktrout’s name on his 1803 map, possibly the site of a workshop.6

One by one, Mary Bucktrout’s three older children married and left home. Rachel wedded Hipolyte Repitan, became widowed in 1819, then married Williamsburg tailor and storekeeper James Davis. By 1821 the couple was living in Hampton with Rachel’s little daughter Mary by her first husband. Horatio Bucktrout took Anne Portlock for his wife and was residing in Norfolk a year before his death in 1848. By his early twenties, Benjamin Earnshaw had united with Louisiana Talbot Cosby, called Lucy, of Yorktown. In 1828 they bought half of a large house just west of Market Square on Duke of Gloucester, more often called Main Street, and four years later purchased the former James Geddy House across the street. That gave them more room to raise their four children as well as take in college students as boarders. Sydney Smith of a prominent Yorktown family boarded with the family in 1841. After he graduated from William and Mary’s law school in 1846, Smith married Benjamin’s oldest daughter, Virginia, and in 1849 moved into what is now called the Thomas Everard House on Palace Green. Benjamin died in 1846, followed by his son three years later, leaving Lucy with two daughters, Mary and Louisiana, called Lutie. Williamsburg’s Methodist minister, James E. Joyner, was no doubt a great solace to the grieving widow and mother, for in 1850 Lucy became his wife.7

As the youngest son, Richard remained at home to take care of his chronically ill mother. At her death in 1834, he inherited the Bucktrout property, including the family home. The same year he married seventeen-year-old Delia Adelaide Churchill Higgins from neighboring New Kent County. In 1836 their first son, Josiah Nelson, was born but lived only nine months. Another son, Richard Manning Jr., lived six years, from 1841 to 1847, and a third, Horatio Nelson, nearly nine years, from 1845 to 1854. The Bucktrouts’ only surviving children were two daughters, Mary Elizabeth, called Polly, born about 1840, and Delia Adelaide Churchill, born 1847. Young Delia was just ten years old in December 1857 when her mother, after months of “lingering illness,” succumbed to a “general dropsical effusion.” A bereaved Bucktrout jotted a notation in his daybook on December 4 that his “dear wife” was “perfectly in her sensis and perfectly resigned to die, and died without a struggle.” Within a couple years, in July 1859, Polly married William Wooten, but her father preceded her to the altar by three months. Much like his father before him, Bucktrout at fifty-four took Celestia Lindsay, only twenty years old, for his second wife in April 1859.8

Bucktrout was already well accustomed to following his father’s footsteps. Like old Benjamin, he served in Williamsburg’s militia company, advancing from second sergeant to first lieutenant between 1833 and 1837. He was then elected captain of the Light Infantry attached to the 68th regiment of Virginia militia. Also like his father, he served off and on as magistrate in Williamsburg’s Common Hall, and as a merchant he dealt in such commodities as lard and coal. Real estate seemed to interest both father and son. In 1835 young Bucktrout acquired an old house near the eastern end of Main Street and probably rented it out until the early 1850s, when he apparently tore it down and built a new house on the property. His daybook indicates that he then rented out his old home and owned other rental property as well. He also bought six acres of land in James City County just south of his old family home for a modest farm. There he raised grains, pigs, and poultry to sell, and kept a horse and cart for hire.9

Most importantly, Bucktrout inherited from his father the ability to work with his hands. Only seven years old at the time of old Benjamin’s death, Richard could not have learned from him the skills of a master craftsman. Yet he probably inherited his father’s tools and could do almost anything from locksmithing to glazing, furniture repair, and rough and finished carpentry. As early as 1831 he made a fire screen, painted a fender, and repaired the front yard gate of a Williamsburg customer. His daybook mentions such diverse jobs as “takeing mahogany wardrobe to pieces and put it together again” (all for fifty cents) and installing window sills, sashes, frames, and panes. He hung curtain rods, curtains, shutters, and blinds; repaired guns, door bells, dining room bells, and telescopes; raised up floors, installed fireplace grates, sharpened saws, shingled dormer windows, turned banisters, and built shelves. Other days he might be hired to pack up a piano or to superintend moving a house from one side of a yard to the other.10

Such activities usually filled in Bucktrout’s time when he was not constructing coffins. Though listed in the 1850 census as a merchant, by 1860 his primary occupation was undertaker. His coffin shop was in the “long tall frame building” just west of his house on South Back Street. At his new home on Main Street he set up shop in the raised basement, where he provided all kinds of coffins from simple pine boxes for his poorer customers to more expensive and elaborate mahogany or black walnut coffins for the wealthy. Metallic burial cases, invented in 1849, began to make their appearance in Williamsburg five years later, selling for about the same price as the mahogany coffins and ensuring protection from vermin and the elements. Bucktrout never mentioned the coffins’ shape, but in the 1850s they were changing from the traditional octagonal to rectangular. Most, except the very simplest, were lined, usually with flannel, trimmed, sometimes with tassels, and encased. Many had a raised top (or “raistop,” as Bucktrout spelled it), others were flat, and at least one he made with a double top. A few were covered with black crepe or shrouded in flannel. The most popular decorations included silver handles, ornamental or silver screws, moldings, and engraved silver breastplates.11

Along with building coffins, Bucktrout provided burial services to match each customer’s social class, which was determined primarily by race, ancestry, and education. Whites, composing a little less than half of Williamburg’s population of approximately sixteen hundred persons in 1860, dominated the top social niches. The town contained “some ten or fifteen families of great intelligence and refinement who contributed the principal society in the place,” observed William and Mary professor Dr. Silas Totten when he first arrived in Williamsburg in 1849. “They were social, kind, and hospitable,” and made up about one third of Bucktrout’s customers. Because the wealthy usually bought his most expensive coffins and frequently hired him for the many odd jobs to be done in their homes or places of business, they accounted for just under two thirds of his income. Wealth and birth were not as important as education for entry into “society,” however. Thus, genteel families usually sent their children to the best classical schools to prepare their sons for college and their daughters for marriage to college graduates. Termed “quality folks” by the blacks, most gentry owned slaves for domestic chores and to work their county plantations while they lived in town to pursue such professions as law, medicine, and education. “Ladies” and “gentlemen,” by definition, did no manual labor. Their workday ended generally before 3 o’clock when they had dinner. After that until the lighter evening meal, called supper or tea, they promenaded the streets making social calls and taking tea wherever they happened to be visiting. Summers were spent at Virginia’s mineral spring mountain resorts. Traditionally, they worshipped at the Episcopal Bruton Parish Church and governed it as vestrymen.12

By far the largest segment of Williamsburg’s white population belonged to the working class, those who made their living by their own hands. Shopkeepers and merchants, shoemakers and tailors, seamstresses and milliners, bakers and confectioners, harness makers and saddlers, coach makers and wheelwrights, brick masons, painters, mechanics, carpenters, plasterers, blacksmiths, and middling farmers provided most of the town’s goods and services. Usually buying Bucktrout’s mid-priced coffins, the working class comprised about half of his customers and roughly one third of his income. Some of the more well to do, primarily successful merchants and building contractors, also used his repair services. Middle class education usually went only as far as the three “R”s, as attested by Bucktrout’s creative spelling in his daybook. A few of the more ambitious with talent and means furthered their education by attending college. They could then enter a profession and be accepted into society, particularly if they also married into it. Most of the working class, called “plain folks” by the blacks, could not afford their own slaves but often hired the gentry’s surplus labor. Others of comfortable means acquired a few servants to help out at home and business. In the 1850s Bucktrout owned at least four slaves, including a cook and a valuable carpenter named William Waller. The undertaker was prosperous enough to treat his family to a vacation in Fauquier County’s White Sulphur Springs the summer before his wife’s death, possibly as much in hopes of a cure as for recreation.13

Bucktrout was also one of the few of his class to be elected to the Bruton Parish vestry, from 1832 until 1838, while he maintained the church building. His first wife was a lifelong Methodist, however, and Bucktrout along with many of the working class eventually switched to that denomination. In 1842 the Methodists erected a new house of worship on Main Street and within a decade were the largest congregation in Williamsburg. They were already being challenged by the white Baptists, who organized about 1835, meeting in the old Powder Horn until they built a new church in classical Greek style also on Main Street in 1856.14

Another Baptist church under construction about the same time belonged to the oldest Baptist congregation in Williamsburg and the first African American Baptist congregation to be organized in America. Funded by subscriptions from slaveholders and by suppers and fairs conducted by the blacks, the brick church built across Francis Street from the Lunatic Asylum functioned as a social as well as a religious center for Williamsburg’s slaves and free blacks. Sunday was always a day off for servants, when they, rather than whites, dominated the streets. They also had a week of holiday between Christmas and New Years. January first was called “Hiring Day.” Williamsburg streets thronged with slave owners bargaining with potential employers, while servants milled about enjoying their last day off. Slaves were usually hired for one year to perform whatever tasks were needed from menial housework to skilled labor. The majority of free blacks, numbering about one hundred twenty in Williamsburg, hired themselves out as house servants, but several owned their own businesses. A few free blacks owned slaves, typically their own family members. Though people of color had no opportunities for formal education, free blacks in business could read and write, as could a few slaves, particularly the more pampered house servants. Owners were responsible for their slaves’ funeral expenses and usually purchased Bucktrout’s cheapest coffins. Occasionally an association called the Williamsburg Black Society or Christian Baptist Sisters Society would donate funds to cover a more elaborate burial. Free blacks, who made up about one sixth of Bucktrout’s customers, bought his most reasonable product and thus were responsible for only a small fraction of his receipts.15

Not every free black was able to afford even the cheapest coffin for a loved one. According to the daybook, the five dollar coffin Pleasant Baker bought for his daughter in 1854 was beyond his means, and he sporadically tried to work off his debt to Bucktrout until his suicide five years later. Town gossip attributed his distress to the fear that his wife and children, whom he had labored to buy out of slavery, would be resold for his debts. At Baker’s death, his wife Arena remained in bonds and Bucktrout acquired at least one of his daughters, Eliza, to hire out for debt payment.16

Anybody, black or white, dying without family or means, Bucktrout buried at the town’s expense in the French soldiers’ burial ground behind his house. Some paupers lay in shallow graves over the soldiers’ remains. Bucktrout had a contract with York County to bury the poor, mostly free blacks, at three dollars a coffin. Many of their families ordered more expensive coffins that they were unable to afford, but Bucktrout had trouble collecting payment even from York County. In early 1860 he submitted to its board of the Overseer of the Poor a list of fifteen coffins he had provided since 1855 with the hope of being paid at least a portion. “I will be very mutch obliged to you gentlemen to do the best you can for me,” he added, “as it is a hard case to refuse a coffin when come for.” His ledger indicates few payments for any of these coffins.17

Collection came easier with Bucktrout’s largest account, the Eastern Lunatic Asylum. From its inception, the asylum had been dominated by Williamsburg gentry appointed for life by Virginia’s governor to the board of directors. That changed in 1851 with a new Virginia law allowing the governor to appoint a board of eleven directors for three-year terms. Having a close affiliation with the asylum had always been financially advantageous to the directors, but now these advantages were open to anyone currently in favor with the governor, usually Williamsburg’s more faithful members of his political party. In January 1852 the Democratic governor appointed Williamsburg’s staunchest Democrat, Richard M. Bucktrout, to fill a vacancy on the board. Over the next nine years, until December 1860, Bucktrout served continuously, except for seven months from November 1854 to June 1855, when again he was appointed to fill a vacancy. His carpentry skills came in handy, for in the previous three decades the hospital had expanded its original building and added several more to accommodate its ever-growing clientele. In 1853 and 1854 especially, Bucktrout worked regularly and frequently altering and repairing these edifices. This activity suddenly ceased about the time he temporarily left the board and did not resume when he was reappointed in mid-1855. Perhaps a public disclosure that all but two directors “were pecuniarily interested in the asylum,” contrary to the law, was responsible for the change. For the next two years, Bucktrout performed only an occasional odd job on the buildings and later sold a few loads of oats and some milk to the institution.18

Bucktrout’s best business was providing coffins for asylum patients. In June 1852, six months after joining the board, he first recorded burying two inmates, and during the next eight years interred about two dozen. Most were “pay patients,” who covered their own expenses, and thus were not charged to the state. Nevertheless, the appearance that he was profiting from his position as a director attracted the criticism of Stephen J. Pendleton, a young William and Mary law school graduate. In April 1858 Pendleton wrote a series of letters to the Virginia Gazetteunder the pseudonym “Junius,” accusing the board of corruption. He particularly charged Bucktrout with burying an average of twenty inmates a year at fifty dollars a coffin, giving him a profit of one thousand to fifteen hundred dollars a year. Since Bucktrout ignored this outlandish accusation, Pendleton went a step further the following month publishing an advertisement in the Gazette accusing Bucktrout of slandering him and his wife and refusing to retract it after Pendleton accosted him on Main Street. Pendleton then resorted to name-calling and went so far as to charge Bucktrout with having “taken human life! And who if his victim had been a white man, would have been hung by the neck long ago—and who more recently escaped indictment for having violated his oath as a commissioner of elections, only on the grounds of ignorance!” What Pendleton meant by these charges is hard to say. The town’s oldest physician, Dr. Samuel Stuart Griffin, commented in a letter dated May 11, 1858, that he could “discern not even a shadow of extenuation for so infamous a publication.” Rather than let the insult pass, Bucktrout, “a very determined man, paid a visit to the printing office at night with a few friends, and so terrified” the editors “& two or three others engaged in the protection of the Establishment that they made the most humiliating apologies.”19

Such episodes provided much-needed excitement in a town generally considered insufferably dull by its inhabitants. Frequent parties and dances, church fairs, frolics, and foxhunts helped to alleviate the boredom, as did the occasional professional drama or musical group passing through town. Many people would flock to hear a visiting preacher or lecturer, and some enjoyed listening to the College debating societies and student orations on Washington’s Birthday and the July 4th graduation exercises. Once, in May 1860, a circus came to town for the day. Another entertainment open to everyone was gossip. “Williamsburg like all small towns was a little gossipy,” according to one lady, who quoted her friend’s remark “that if the Angel Gabriel came to Williamsburg they wouldn’t leave a feather in his wings.” This habit was not confined to women, for Bucktrout himself could be found chatting with the asylum’s superintendent, Dr. John Minson Galt II, about the social habits of neighboring blacks. When local merchant Edwin Hurt announced his intention to run for the legislature in 1855, the Gazette wondered who would look after his store if he were elected. An anonymous letter pointed out that Hurt had nothing to worry about, for Williamsburg “citizens are known for their kindness in attending to their neighbors’ business, sometimes better than their own.”20

A merchant running for the legislature was indeed noteworthy in Williamsburg, where politics—national, state, and especially local—provided the town’s favorite form of entertainment. Because the new state constitution adopted in 1851 did away with the property requirement, all white men could now vote. Working class men, outnumbering the gentry, could more easily elect one of their own, thus profoundly changing the face of Williamsburg politics. As Dr. Galt’s sister Elizabeth Galt observed during the annual local elections in May 1852, “so many little offices are open alike to all, & will be filled by the most popular.” Bucktrout, a candidate for magistrate, answered that description. His party, the Democrats, had split into two wings that year, and only the candidates supported by both factions would prevail over candidates of the Whig party, which had been opposing the Democrats for a generation. Both parties were about evenly represented in Williamsburg, but already the Whigs were disintegrating nationally over the slavery question. After the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act exacerbated the slavery problem, the Whigs ceased as a national party and survived in Williamsburg only until a new party emerged to replace it.21

The first mention of this new party, known as the Know Nothings or American Party, appeared in the March 8, 1855 Gazette. This venerable newspaper had departed Williamsburg when the state government moved to Richmond in 1780 but was reintroduced in August 1853. It remained politically neutral through a succession of editors until one J. Hervey Ewing began advocating Know Nothingism with its anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic platform. Though Williamsburg contained few immigrants—except for a highly respected German Jewish family of merchants named Hofheimer—and even fewer Catholics, former Whigs and several disaffected Democrats joined it and gave the American candidate sixty-six of Williamsburg’s one hundred seventeen votes in Virginia’s May 1855 gubernatorial election. Nevertheless, the Democrat Henry A. Wise, personally and politically disliked by many Williamsburg Democrats, won the election, and the traditional cannons fired and bells rang on Market Square in celebration. At a Democratic victory party, Bucktrout offered a toast: “To Know Nothingism—oil and water—made to mix only by those new politico chemical agents—money and power.”22

Local politics, however, dominated most space in the Gazette with its longstanding policy of haranguing the Common Hall. Of the eight magistrates elected in May 1856, six were members of the American party, Bucktrout being one of the two Democrats. Yet the Gazette was dissatisfied and persisted in calling the group “old fogeys,” too cheap to raise taxes for needed improvements and so short-sighted they “blocked up the avenue of enterprise.” They must be “fond of seeing fires,” opined Ewing, for the town had no fire engine to control sporadic outbreaks. The College paid dearly for this oversight in February 1859 when fire gutted the Main Building for the second time in its history. Another major conflagration in December of that year reduced the revered old Raleigh Tavern to ashes, along with the store next to it. The owner of the store, and one of Bucktrout’s best customers, William Walker Vest, bought the tavern property and within a few months began erecting the town’s largest store, “a new brick edifice,” which, the Gazette declared, “will do credit to that portion of the city.”23

The newspaper’s enthusiasm for the new store reflected its concern over Williamburg’s dire lack of commercial property. The most logical business location, Market Square, remained primarily cow pasture due to the Common Hall’s refusal to allow construction there. When the magistrates did approve a new building on the square—a courthouse to replace the inadequate Old Courthouse of 1770—they managed it so poorly that it became another target of criticism. The contract for the new courthouse was let out to local builder and former mayor Johnson Sands amid suspicion of corruption. Cost overruns stalled the work, forcing the Common Hall to apply to the Virginia legislature for funds. The petition was turned down on the grounds that if Williamsburg were reimbursed, other towns would want to be also. The magistrates then came up with the idea of selling public streets “of no possible benefit to the place,” and managed to obtain money from the state after all by selling to the asylum two streets adjacent to it. The new courthouse remained unfinished more than a year later, when the Gazette suggested the town fathers “put a cap on top as an everlasting monument to their laudable ambition.”24

Neither had the Common Hall dealt effectively with the street problem. Travelers riding to Williamsburg by stagecoach were frequently almost suffocated with the dust, and “as we entered the town the dust seemed to increase,” Dr. Totton complained when he first arrived. “The trees, the grass, the houses, were all begrimed with dust.” During the rainy season, this dust turned to mud. Some mud holes on Main Street, asserted the Gazette, were of “sufficient depth to stall wagons, or drown mules.” Every spring and fall the town hired slaves, including some of Bucktrout’s, to dig up the sides of the streets and haul it into the center. Yet these holes persisted, especially one on Richmond Road near the College known as Frog Pond, which produced prodigious crops of amphibians every summer. Sidewalks could be equally impassable. Actually just footpaths between the houses and street, the walks were obstructed by the roots of mulberry trees lining Main Street, and pedestrians actually lost shoes in these muddy walks after a good rain. Again the Common Hall refused to pave either streets or sidewalks. Without this improvement, the Gazette declared, the town would never prosper.25

Indeed, prosperity and progress were the two words most frequently ascribed to America at this time. In the decade of the 1850s the country took giant strides in everything from transportation and communication to manufacturing, agriculture, and education. Williamsburg, however, was having difficulty keeping up with these strides, mainly because she still had one foot firmly planted in the eighteenth century. In 1853 the Gazette optimistically averred that “the Old Town, partaking of the general progress of the age, is again looking up,” but most visitors tended to disagree. One traveler wrote in 1855 that Williamsburg has “not kept pace with the progress of the times. It bears the marks of age more than of improvement. Its wide streets are but little disturbed by business, and its ancient edifices much need the hand of a painter.” Another remarked that the town’s businesses had no signs over their doors to identify them. A visitor the following year detected some improvement in the Old Burg, observing, “many of her houses exhibit the remote architecture of the early settlers of Virginia, whilst others are in keeping with the improved style of modern buildings.” The Gazette too noted this progress, counting four new houses, as well as the prominent new churches, under construction in December 1856. “Our city is ‘looking up’ in more respects than one,” the paper crowed, and later warned Richmond that at this rate,” we’ll have the capital and Capitol back again.” But before Williamsburg could “take a much more conspicuous stand among our cities,” she needed a bank, book store, stationery store, silver smith, clock maker, upholsterer, furniture maker, cooper, tanner, seed store, carriage maker, and livery stable, to name a few. The Gazette attributed these lacks, at least in part, “to the quiet, unenterprising temper of our people.”26

Another reason Williamsburg failed to attract new businesses was its reputation for being unhealthy. This assertion the Gazette flatly denied. The area was certainly healthier than Norfolk, which was devastated by a yellow fever epidemic in the summer of 1855. By the end of that August, Williamsburg was sheltering some one hundred Norfolk refugees, though other towns refused them, and had collected over three hundred dollars to help relieve their suffering. Yet, despite the Gazette’s insistence that typhoid fever was practically unknown in Williamsburg, the town did endure a yearly “sickly season” in August and September, typically resulting in two or three deaths. Malarial “ague fever” and bilious fever may have been comparatively trivial and seldom fatal, as the newspaper asserted, but tuberculosis (called consumption), scarlet fever, diphtheria, measles, and whooping cough were among the many common diseases. All contributed to a high infant mortality rate. Few families, regardless of social status, had been untouched by the loss of a little one.27

Where to put the dead was becoming a major problem in the middle of the 1850s. In 1855 the Gazette pointed out that Bruton Churchyard was so crowded after two hundred years of interments, that “not one foot of earth is untenanted, and what is truly lamentable, no new body is buried, without disturbing and exposing to view, the bones of a past generation.” Many families dedicated a corner of their back yard as a burial plot. The College opened a small cemetery in 1859, but what Williamsburg needed was a four-acre field just south of town that could be developed into a spacious, park-like cemetery, which were becoming so popular in America. The Common Hall finally purchased this tract in 1859 and put Bucktrout in charge. The city was to be reimbursed by the sale of the lots, the price set at two dollars, and after August 1, 1860, no one could be buried in Bruton Churchyard without special permission.28

This new City Cemetery manifested to the world that “although we are only a little Village, we do not like to be behind the times.” When in 1853 a new railroad line was proposed to link Richmond with the York River, nearly everyone in Williamsburg with a few spare dollars jumped at the opportunity to invest in it. Bucktrout was among the interested. True to regional custom, the York River Railroad was still not completed at the end of the decade. Nor did telegraph lines, already connecting the rest of the country, yet grace the Williamsburg landscape. Steam power, however, carried the residents to Richmond and Norfolk in side-wheel riverboats plying both the James and York rivers. Steam whistles from nearby gristmills and sawmills could also be heard in Williamsburg. When a Mr. Hazelgrove set up a machine and finishing shop on Market Square in the summer of 1860, he “greeted the denizens of Williamsburg to a shrill whistle from his full blown steam engine.” The Gazette wished him much success but noted that “several of the non-enterprising men of this place have raised the ‘hue and cry’ of nuisance, and have endeavored to throw a damper on the project.”29

Even before the 1850s, Williamsburg farmers began embracing agricultural advancements. Farmland long ago depleted by tobacco had been producing profitable crops of corn, wheat, oats, and other grains since early in the century with improved fertilizing and marling methods. Recently introduced guano further enhanced the soil, and wealthy planters such as Dr. Robert P. Waller began to experiment with newly-invented farm machinery—threshers, corn huskers, wheat drills, and even a corn planter devised by a Williamsburg mechanic. In August 1850 local farmers organized an Agricultural Society. It was headed by planter James Custis, one of the first to discover that keeping his hogs penned instead of letting them roam freely in the streets, as most people did, gave him fatter hogs and more manure to fertilize his crops.30

Such progress could not be sustained, reasoned mid-nineteenth century America, without properly educating the nation’s youth. New colleges and secondary schools began to proliferate all over the country, and in this Williamsburg was no exception. In the fall of 1850 Dr. Galt’s sister Sally remarked that an academy was being erected “in the ruins of the old Capitol in the grecian order of architecture,” to be known as the Williamsburg Female Academy for young ladies. Its 1851-52 catalog listed both Mary and Louisiana Bucktrout, daughters of the late Benjamin E. Bucktrout. In March 1854 Richard Bucktrout noted in his daybook that he paid twenty five dollars for his two girls’ tuition for “the last half session,” and in 1858 he was hired to screw twenty-four desks down to the floor of the Female Academy. Two new schools for boys opened in 1852, making the town “a very desirable residence for persons having children to educate,” wrote Dr. Galt. The Gazette counted six secondary schools in October 1857, and a year later Dr. Griffin observed that “Schools are starting up, like mushrooms, in every part of our City.” Another one or two were added by the opening of the 1860 school year. At that time William and Mary’s Main Building had been rebuilt sporting a modern façade of Italianate twin towers. Many hoped that the old college would at last be able to compete with the University of Virginia.31

Along with progress in education came social and spiritual reforms that gained momentum in the United States throughout the 1850s and had various effects on Williamsburg. The temperance movement rising in the North drew comment from the Gazette as early as September 1853. It apparently did not penetrate Williamsburg until nationally known temperance speaker Lucien Minor arrived in 1856 as the College’s new law professor. Two years after Minor’s death in 1858, the Sons of Temperance erected a monument over his grave in the College cemetery. About the same time Williamsburg formed its own temperance society composed of both men and women. Closely associated with the temperance movement, a religious revival also started in the North and arrived in Williamsburg by early 1860, sweeping many new converts into the town’s churches. Baptisms were performed at the new Baptist church in a convenient built-in pool below the pulpit, though most entering the African Church still preferred the old fashioned dip in College Creek at College Landing.32

One northern reform never openly endorsed in Williamsburg, at least among white citizens, was abolitionism. Dr. Waller’s niece Nanny Waller perceived this threat to the southern social structure in July 1850 when President Zachary Taylor died. “His place is to be filled by Abolitionists,” she believed, “which I fear will result in a disunion of this heretofore peaceful Union.” Millard Fillmore’s administration failed to fulfill Nanny’s prophecy, but in September 1853 the Gazette announced with apprehension the birth of a new political party in Ohio “composed of Whigs, Democrats, Free Soilers and Maine Liquor Law Men.” Ominously, the Republican Party also attracted the energetic and uncompromising abolitionists. The surprising strength of the Republican presidential candidate in 1856 led Dr. Galt to write that Williamsburg people “fear the future, as a comparatively slight increase in the vote of the Black Republicans, might elect their Candidate and break up the Union.” Soon after this election, rumors of a slave insurrection began to circulate in Williamsburg, causing panic “in the minds of this community, and especially in the female populace,” according to a January 1857 Gazette. By that time, any immediate crisis was over, thanks to Williamsburg’s “most efficient and vigilant police.” The paper suggested that this police force be increased in November 1859 after news of John Brown’s October raid on Harper’s Ferry ignited still greater fears of racial rebellion. The Gazette told of two Williamsburg slaves overheard discussing their opinion “that the negro population would finally predominate.”33

The Harper’s Ferry raid also inspired a call for the revival of Williamsburg’s old 68th militia regiment. This resulted in the formation of the Williamsburg Junior Guards on November 8, 1859, but without their old militia captain. Perhaps Bucktrout, now fifty-five, deemed himself too old to serve or too busy with his business and many civic duties, and his new young wife may have been expecting by this time. The Junior Guards trained and drilled throughout 1860, frequently interrupted by political meetings in a tumultuous election year. Abraham Lincoln’s election as president in November was, as Dr. Galt predicted, closely followed in December by the secession of South Carolina and soon after by other states in the deep South. Virginia held out until southern forces fired on Federal-held Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, and forced its surrender on April 12, 1861. At that time Lincoln called for 75,000 militia to quell the insurrection. On April 17 Virginia’s state convention passed an Ordinance of Secession, and the following month Richmond, only about ninety miles from Washington, D. C., became the capital of the new Confederacy.34

Though Virginia was now part of the Confederate States of America, the United States maintained a firm toehold at Fort Monroe on the tip of the Peninsula. About halfway between there and Richmond lay Williamsburg. The possibility that Union soldiers would march up the Peninsula or sail up the James or York rivers to invade the Confederate capital prompted a need for defensive works near Williamsburg. In early May College president Benjamin Ewell, who had graduated from the U. S. Military Academy at West Point, obtained a commission in the Confederate army and orders to command the Peninsula. He immediately began to plan a line of earthworks across the Peninsula just east of Williamsburg and put the Junior Guards, as well as local slaves, to work building them. More Confederate troops poured into town near the end of May. On the evening of the twenty-fifth, Bucktrout’s nephew from Richmond, J. Staunton Moore, showed up on his doorstep. Moore had arrived in Williamsburg that day with his regiment, the 3rd Virginia Volunteers, soon to become the 15th Virginia Infantry. The Bucktrouts “were all very much surprised to see me, but appeared very glad,” Moore wrote home that night. He found his uncle “engaged in surveying the ground for a day or two, as there is some fear of an attack being made in this place.”35

No attack disturbed Williamsburg in May, but near the end of the month Federal soldiers began to range out of Fort Monroe and threaten the little village of Hampton. During the night of May 30, scores of Hampton refugees arrived in Williamsburg. Some continued on westward, but many stayed and contributed to the overcrowded conditions, which were already beginning to spread disease. In early June Mrs. Letitia Tyler Semple, daughter of former President John Tyler, opened Williamsburg’s first hospital for soldiers at the Female Academy. When the 10th Georgia regiment came to Williamsburg to help construct the earthworks, another hospital was set up in the deserted halls of William and Mary. For both of these hospitals Williamsburg ladies worked hard, sewing bedding and pillows, furnishing refreshments, and volunteering their nursing skills among the sick soldiers. Officers who fell ill were usually welcomed into private homes to recuperate.36

Before long, some sick soldiers started dying, and Bucktrout found a new source of business. He made coffins for six of the fallen in July. Three were members of the local 32nd Virginia regiment, which included the Junior Guards, and were sent home to be buried. One came from the 2nd Louisiana regiment. Another two were Georgians, at least one of whom Bucktrout interred in the new City Cemetery. The company captain of the deceased bore all burial expenses, including ten dollars for the coffin. The number of deaths exploded to seventeen in August when Williamsburg’s “sickly season” of typhoid fever began. It was especially hard on military newcomers. Of the seventeen dead, only one hailed from the Peninsula. Seven were from the recently-arrived 14th Virginia and the rest from Georgia and Louisiana.37

Sometime during August, Bucktrout began arranging the burials at the City Cemetery in rows by state. By the end of September, sixteen graves were filled in the Georgia row and nine in the Louisiana row. That month Bucktrout contracted with the Confederate government to provide coffins at ten dollars apiece, though the captains were still responsible for any burial fees or extras, at least until November. Bucktrout charged two dollars for digging the grave, usually a dollar for “conveyance to carry corps to the burying ground,” and a dollar fifty for the optional headboard with the soldier’s name carved in it. Packing the body for shipping could run five dollars or more.38

Midway through October, the need for beds had so increased, that all Williamsburg churches were converted into hospitals. November saw the opening of three new cemetery rows for Florida, North Carolina, and Alabama troops added to the work force on the Peninsula. An estimated seven or eight hundred sick soldiers were then distributed among about ten hospitals, including all four churches, the new courthouse, and Vest’s new store, plus several private homes. Local ladies served as nurses in all of them, and many a romance commenced between young belles and gray-clad beaux. Miss Delia Bucktrout made the acquaintance of Lt. William Braithwaite of the 32nd Virginia, possibly while he was convalescing in Bruton Church.39

In early December, Confederate Brig. Gen. John Bankhead Magruder, commanding the Peninsula since late May, expected a Federal advance any day and ordered the sick in Williamsburg to be sent to Richmond. They had no sooner departed, than the hospital beds began to refill. The Federals failed to advance, but deaths kept occurring, mainly among Louisianans suffering the effects of a mid-Atlantic winter. By the end of the year, thirty-one Louisiana graves were full, along with twenty-nine Georgia graves, eleven Virginia, seven Alabama, five North Carolina, and two Florida, not counting the many who had been sent home. Fatalities began to diminish in January 1862, when Bucktrout rented the 32nd Virginia’s quartermaster, former William and Mary math professor and Williamsburg native, Capt. Thomas McCandlish, one of his basement rooms for the quartermaster office. A few more graves were added to the rows in February, but despite an outbreak of scarlet fever, the March death count was only eleven, the lowest since October.40

April brought a new threat, however. Many of Bucktrout’s old Williamsburg customers abandoned their homes that month as one hundred twelve thousand northern troops under Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan began steaming down the Chesapeake Bay from Washington and landing at Fort Monroe. After an attempt to march on Richmond the previous July had failed at Manassas, the Federal army was now attempting to reach the southern capital by way of the Peninsula. It stopped at a formidable line of earthworks built across the Peninsula at Yorktown, twelve miles below Williamsburg, and spent the rest of the month dragging huge siege guns into place. This delay allowed the main Confederate army, some fifty-four thousand in all, commanded by Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, to assemble on the Peninsula. Skirmish casualties from the Yorktown line began showing up in Williamsburg in early April, and sickness caused by crouching in trenches flooded with heavy spring rains kept most hospital beds full. The swelling patient count forced more vacant private homes to be converted into hospitals. A South Carolina row opened in the cemetery and within the month had ten occupants, along with seven in a new Mississippi row, and one in a Tennessee row. Alabama’s row had increased to twenty-three, but Georgia’s took top honors at fifty-six.41

Just as the Federal siege guns were ready to open on Yorktown the beginning of May, Johnston ordered the evacuation of all moveable sick from Williamsburg to Richmond in preparation for the withdrawal of his troops from Yorktown. The main body of his army began its retrograde movement toward Richmond in the middle of Saturday night, May 3, while McClellan’s men slept. Union cavalry and flying artillery units pursued early Sunday morning and caught up with the Confederate rear guard that afternoon just east of Williamsburg. There they found a line of fourteen individual fortifications, or redoubts, strung across the Peninsula and anchored in the center by the massive Fort Magruder looming over the main road from Yorktown. A brief skirmish involving an artillery duel and two cavalry charges resulted in a few casualties.42

Throughout Sunday night and into early Monday morning, May 5, Johnston’s troops tried to continue their march to Richmond but were now hampered by a developing rainstorm. At dawn the lead brigade of Brig. Gen. Joseph Hooker’s Federal division debauched from the woods in front of the redoubts, only a few of which were occupied by two brigades of Brig. Gen. James Longstreet’s Confederate division. Soon the trickle of wounded into Williamsburg became a flood as more brigades on each side joined the fray. Some townspeople climbed to the observation platform of the asylum’s Gothic Building tower to view the battle through the rain, while others fed hungry soldiers, nursed the wounded, or, in Bucktrout’s case, tended the dead. Another blue division under Brig. Gen. Philip Kearny slogged through the mud and rain to reach the battlefield that afternoon. The capture of two redoubts by Union Brig. Gen. Winfield S. Hancock’s brigade forced another gray division commanded by Brig. Gen. Daniel Harvey Hill to turn back from its march to Richmond in a vain and bloody attempt to retake them. That night when the guns fell silent, the Confederate army once again slipped away in the darkness while the Federals slept.43

As the tail of the southern rear guard dragged out of the western end of Williamsburg about dawn the next morning, the head of McClellan’s blue columns entered the eastern end. Nearly every public building and most homes were full of Confederate wounded and dead, forced to remain behind for lack of transportation. Surgeons from North and South worked side by side on Union wounded now occupying the College and Academy Hospitals and Confederate wounded mostly in the churches and homes. Soldier details began cleaning up the battlefield, where most of the fallen in both uniforms were shoveled into common graves. The Union soldiers were later removed to a national cemetery in Yorktown. Bucktrout had time to bury only a few southerners, including Brig. Gen. Richard Anderson’s brother and the colonel of the 2nd Florida, before the chaplain of a New Jersey brigade hired him to pack seven officers for shipment home.44

After three days of rest and recuperation in Williamsburg, the Union army resumed its pursuit of the Confederates waiting for them outside of Richmond. McClellan left behind a small occupying force to hold the town and to ship the wounded north. Most southern soldiers who died in the Baptist Church were dumped unceremoniously into large trenches on Market Square. A few were turned over to Bucktrout to be interred in Bruton Churchyard or in the state rows in the City Cemetery. On May 18 the town suffered another great loss in the death of Dr. Galt, ending three generations of Galt rule at the asylum. The roar of a seven-day struggle for Richmond was audible in Williamsburg at the end of June into early July. At last in late August, what was left of McClellan’s magnificent army retreated back down the Peninsula through Williamsburg. The 5th Pennsylvania Cavalry stationed at Fort Magruder continued to occupy the town, which, for the next two years, constituted the closest point to the Confederate capital held by the North.45

Not content to leave the Federals alone, southern scouts patrolling the Peninsula between Richmond and Williamsburg began a series of harassing raids on the town. During the first one, September 9,1862, Williamsburg’s military governor, Col. David Campbell, was captured, and in retaliation, some drunken Pennsylvania cavalrymen set fire to William and Mary’s newly-reconstructed Main Building. In April 1863 another Confederate raid led by Brig. Gen. Henry A. Wise kept the Federal force out of Williamsburg for a couple weeks and allowed a few more citizens to escape into Dixie. Subsequently, Williamsburg settled down under a series of provost marshals alternately benevolent and tyrannical. To relieve the destitute populace, Federal authorities issued them rations and instituted market days when James City County farmers could come to the lines drawn outside town on Richmond and Jamestown Roads to sell their produce. Spies for both sides used Williamsburg as a base, and townspeople devised an underground mail system and a smuggling operation to link them with their loved ones in the Confederacy.46

Among the many girls who concealed mail in their hoop skirts to pass to Confederate scouts for transport up the Peninsula was young Delia Bucktrout. Her overt hostility to the Federal occupying troops, also common among Williamsburg girls, landed her in so much trouble that she was forced to flee to Richmond to avoid arrest. There she barely eked out a living sewing for the government. Her father sent her clothing, shoes, and money when he could find someone to smuggle them out of Williamsburg, but he had little to spare for himself, his young wife, and their baby son, Horatio Nelson. In July 1864 Bucktrout appointed his nephew Sydney Smith, a refugee in Richmond, his power of attorney with instructions to collect what the Confederate government owed him for coffins. In November of that year he wrote Smith that “everything is very high keep and it is as mutch as i can doe to live as i am a doeing nothing for the Federal Army as they doe all their burying them selves, and what little i doe for the Citizens i get nothing for it as they have no money, or pay me any at any rates.” If Bucktrout ever received any payment, it became worthless after the southern army surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, and the Confederate government collapsed.47
Within days Williamsburg refugees and soldiers began to return home. Some had no homes to return to, for many houses and shops had been burned down or dismantled for kindling or bricks to construct barracks at Fort Magruder. Few had the funds or will to rebuild. The frequency of “Insolvent” scribbled in Bucktrout’s ledger denoted the ruin of many of Williamsburg’s wealthiest families. A few, such as Dr. Waller, were able to scrape up enough cash to hire Bucktrout to repair their intact but dilapidated homes. Without the labor necessary to work their plantations, however, none could escape the poverty common to all. Military authorities continued to replace local government until Virginia was formally readmitted to the Union in 1870. The College struggled to rebuild, though few could afford to educate their sons. The asylum too continued to suffer, especially after the Federal authorities returned it to the state and political faction resumed its rule.48

To dispel the gloom, Williamsburg’s young people launched into a merry round of parties and weddings. Delia Bucktrout celebrated Christmas 1865 by marrying her wartime sweetheart, Lt. William Braithwaite. “The centerpiece on the wedding supper table was a huge watermelon, which, with its vine had been carefully protected from frost by a layer of straw,” according to family tradition. “In spite of the terrible times the Lieut had sent to Paris for a handsome quilted silk vest and a pair of kid gloves.” Within a year, however, Delia’s father was dead. On the afternoon of September 13, 1866, Dr. Waller jotted in his diary, “I heard of the death of poor Bucktrout, who died in the night or early this morning. Very unexpected by me. He was a useful man in the Town.”49

With the demise of Richard M. Bucktrout, the daybook too ended, but not his undertaking business. Delia continued to provide this service to the town until 1908, when her half brother, Horatio N. Bucktrout, took over the business. Horatio’s wife Margaret had “the distinction of being the first licensed Lady Embalmer in Virginia,” according to the July 3, 1931 Gazette. Though no longer associated with the Bucktrout family, Bucktrout Funeral Home maintains a prominent profile in the community to this day and perpetuates a name long associated with Williamsburg.50

Williamsburg, Virginia July 2006