Under Live Oaks The Last Great Plantation Houses of the Old South

Virginia I can shut my eyes now, after all these years, and summon back the scene as vividly as I saw it when we emerged from the long stretch of twilight. I can still see the blue glimmer of the flowers in the grass; the low house, with deep wings, where the stucco was peeling from the red brick beneath a delicate tracery of Virginia creeper; the seven pyramidal cedars guarding the hooded roof of gray shingles; and the clear afterglow in which the little moon sailed like a ship. -Ellen Glasgow, "Whispering Leaves" Sherwood Forest charles city, virginia The history of the great Southern plantations is also the history of the great rivers rolling down the Southern map of the United States. From the Mississippi in the west to the James River in the east, these important waterways fed the wealth of the plantation owners with their efficient trading posts and speed of communication from one side of the country to the other. Sherwood Forest is one of the beneficiaries of these alluvial currents. One of the four so-called James River Plantations, it is steeped in early American history, was home to the tenth president of United States, John Tyler, and has been in the same family for more than 150 years. What sets Sherwood Forest apart, however, is its extraordinary contemporary record of life in the house since before the Civil War, presented in the form of letters and documents belonging to the Tyler family, and now preserved in Virginia museums and libraries. The plantation has its origins in a 1616 land grant. Strategically situated thirty-five miles east of Richmond and eighteen miles west of Williamsburg, both important cities in colonial America, Walnut Grove, as it was then called, was a desirable location not only for its fertile soil but also for those interested in a political career. William Henry Harrison, ninth president of the United States, inherited a part of the property that would become Sherwood Forest in 1790, but its full flowering came with the purchase of the house in 1842 (along with sixteen hundred acres) by John Tyler, who, as vice president to Harrison, became the tenth-and first unelected-president when Harrison died after only thirty days in office. (Tyler had grown up only a few miles from Harrison's birthplace.) Although conservative in his preference for living close to home, John Tyler was a controversial president, ever ready to vote against his party, the Whigs, when he found his own high principles at odds with the party line. In fact he renamed his house Sherwood Forest in recognition of his Robin Hood-like reputation as a political outlaw. Not the least of his unconventional acts was his marriage at the age of fifty-four in 1844, while still in office, to a twenty-four-year-old woman called Julia Gardiner (of the Gardiners Island Gardiners). His first wife died in 1842, after bestowing on him eight children, and the speed with which he married the second, let alone her age, raised more than a few eyebrows. If Tyler was regarded as a nonconformist, Julia Gardiner soon showed she was a match for her husband and that her youth was no impediment to her independence of spirit or self-confidence. On June 30, 1844, she wrote to her sister, Juliana, "I have commenced my auspicious reign and am in quiet possession of the Presidential Mansion." Quiet she may have been in Washington, but her brilliant marriage to Tyler almost entirely shaped the ultimate history of Sherwood Forest. It seems Tyler bought the house with the idea of retiring there after his stormy presidency came to an end in 1845. From 1842 on, he began making renovations, and when Julia first saw the house on her honeymoon in 1844, she wasted no time in bringing her own considerable talents to the project. The house was originally a simple frame house, dating from 1730 (the central three-story section still reflects its age). It is only oSeebohm, Caroline is the author of 'Under Live Oaks The Last Great Plantation Houses of the Old South', published 2002 under ISBN 9780609606995 and ISBN 0609606999.