Category Archives: Richmond

This morning we woke up to donuts and coffee.  Brian made a run out super early, the kids were so happy, and so were we…coffee!!!  For lunch, today it was Connor’s choice, and he chose BBQ.  Off we went to the home of the best BBQ in Richmond, Buz and Ned’s.  You walk up and order your food, they call your name over a loud-speaker, and it was truly one of the best pulled pork BBQ sandwiches I have ever had.

Buz says, “It was on one of my journeys that I ran across Ned at the crossroads connecting the mountains of Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia. Ned was producing the best barbecue I had ever tasted. Using recipes that had been handled down for over 150 years, that old-timer was a county legend and their best-kept secret. Before giving up the ghost, Ned passed his secrets on to me, making me promise to keep his family BBQ tradition alive.  Since 1992”.  www.buzandneds.com

After lunch we drove down town to the National Confederate Museum.  I’ve mentioned before how much Davy likes the Civil War, so we had to take him.  Next to the museum was the home of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederates.  www.moc.org

We ended taking a tour of the Davis home, they wouldn’t let us take any pictures inside, but we did get a few of the kids on the front steps.  Here are some of the things that we learned today….

The White House of the Confederacy is a gray stuccoed neoclassical mansion built in 1818 by John Brockenbrough, who was president of the Bank of Virginia.  Sold by the Brockenbrough family in 1844, the house passed through a succession of wealthy families throughout the antebellum period, including U.S. Congressman and future Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon. Eventually Lewis Dabney Crenshaw sold the home to the City of Richmond, which in turn rented it to the Confederate government as its Executive Mansion.

Jefferson Davis, his second wife Varina (the first was the daughter of president Zachary Taylor, she died from Malaria), and their children moved into the house in August 1861, and lived there for the remainder of the war.  The Davis family was quite young during their stay at the White House of the Confederacy. When they moved in the Family consisted of the President and First Lady, six year-old Margaret, four year-old Jefferson Davis, Jr., and two year-old Joseph. The two youngest Davis children, William and Varina Anne (“Winnie”), were born in the White House, in 1861 and 1864, respectively.  Of the five children, only one Margaret lived to be old enough to grow up and have a family, the other four died of various causes.

The house was abandoned during the evacuation of Richmond on April 2, 1865. Within twelve hours, soldiers from Major General Godfrey Weitzel’s XVIII Corps seized the former Confederate White House, intact. President Abraham Lincoln, who was in nearby City Point (now Hopewell, Virginia), traveled up the James River to tour the captured city, and visited Davis’ former residence for about three hours – although the President only toured the first floor, feeling it would be improper to visit the more private second floor of another man’s home.  Lincoln died 10 days later in DC.

After Davis was captured on May 10, 1865, he was charged with treason. Although he was not tried, he was stripped of his eligibility to run for public office; Congress posthumously lifted this restriction in 1978, 89 years after his death.  While not disgraced, he was displaced in Southern affection after the war by the leading Confederate general Robert E. Lee. However, many Southerners empathized with his defiance, refusal to accept defeat, and resistance to Reconstruction. Over time, admiration for his pride and ideals made him a Civil War hero to many Southerners, and his legacy became part of the foundation of the postwar New South.  By the late 1880s, Davis began to encourage reconciliation by the late 1880s, telling Southerners to be loyal to the Union. He was aided in the last decade of his life by the generosity of Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey, a wealthy widow. First she invited him to her plantation in 1877 near Biloxi, Mississippi at a time when he was ailing, and gave him a cottage to use for working on his memoir. She bequeathed Davis her plantation before her death in 1878, as well as additional funds for his support. This enabled him to live in some comfort with his wife until his death in 1889.

After the tour, the kids were allowed to pick out one thing from the gift shop and we headed home.  They swam in the pool and then Brian took Colin, Connor, and Davy out for putt putt golf and ice cream.